


Palingenesis

by Squashers



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Depression, Flashbacks, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Mentions of Rick Macy, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-07
Updated: 2015-03-26
Packaged: 2018-03-16 16:11:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 44,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3494693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Squashers/pseuds/Squashers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Living" doesn't have to mean beating heart, working lungs. Living means hanging on by your fingertips, it means people make it up as they go along, it means grasping for connection in the dark. And exhaustion, and pain, and one hundred and seventeen emotions all pushed into that dark, wet space between your ribs. It means carving something out of the rubble. It means leaving a mark, closing your eyes and opening them, and finding something standing in front of you that you want to see.</p><p>Kieren and Simon deal with the aftermath of Amy's death, recover and relapse, learn each other, learn themselves, and watch the world change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Still Point

**Author's Note:**

> This is the story that's been known as Big Fic on tumblr. I've been working on it on and off since the end of October, and now it's finally complete.  
> Thank you to those who beta'd this work at its various stages of life: [ughleni](ughleni.tumblr.com), [agirlwithachakram](agirlwithachakram.tumblr.com), [hailsatanacab](hailsatanacab.tumblr.com), [durban-flaws](durban-flaws.tumblr.com), [itdefiesimagination](itdefiesimagination.tumblr.com), [sarcastic-bambi](sarcastic-bambi.tumblr.com), and [thoughtsthroughfog.](thoughtsthroughfog.tumblr.com)  
> And huge, HUGE, massive thank you to my main beta, Zielenna, who was incredibly helpful and so much fun to talk to, and who gave me many ideas and suggestions that ended up in this final version of the story. She is the greatest beta and our conversations are the best.

 

 **Ekpyrosis:** n. (ἐκπύρωσις _ekpurōsis_ , "conflagration.") A belief in the periodic destruction of the cosmos by a great conflagration every Great Year. The cyclical destruction of the universe.

 **Palingenesis:** n. (παλιγγενεσία, "rebirth.") The continual re-creation of the universe after its destruction. A concept of rebirth or re-creation, a concept foreshadowing the event of the regeneration of a new world after an apocalyptic event.

 

* * *

 

Simon has never had to do affirmations. By the time he got out, they all knew he was beyond help. They all knew he was beaten and broken and cracked, and looking in the mirror would only make the damage more obvious. It was too late for affirmations, for him.

The door to the bathroom is open, just wide enough that Simon can peer around the bedroom doorframe to see Kieren staring himself down in the mirror, practicing the medically prescribed lie in a whisper-- like he's studying for exams, he said once. A stale litany, over and over, until you get it just right.

Simon's hand lifts when Kieren's does, pushing against his cheek in sync with the movements in the other room. The whisper washes over him like a secret prayer in a language he doesn't fully understand, his own fingers pressed against his cheek like a numb mirror, trying to interpret a Lovecraftian reflection. He mumbles his own affirmation under his breath in response. What's stopping you ( _I am_ ) from being the people you are ( _a partially deceased syndrome sufferer_ ), instead of copies of ( _what I did in my untreated state_ ) who you used to be ( _is not my fault_ )?

It's all just strings of words like false pearls, no value, no one to sit there and claim them as their own.

Kieren complains about the affirmation when he gets back from Dr. Russo's, annoyance blazing in his eyes, twitching down his neck and into his shoulders. "Look, it's not as if saying those words is going to make it any less true that I did what I did. Maybe it isn't my fault, but it's just plain degrading having to stare at my face in the mirror and repeat affirmations in front of living people. Like they're the ones who have to be told it's not my fault. Like I have to justify myself."

It's been four days since Amy's funeral, and Russo wanted to check on Kieren to make sure his body had no long-lasting side effects from the dose of Blue Oblivion. Simon remembers: losing control feels like bruises all along your nerves for weeks. Kieren had been stiff and tired and twitchy for a day after Gary dosed him, but now he's fine, and Simon's grateful. He loops his fingers around Kieren's wrist and tugs gently until he gives in and collapses onto the stained beige couch beside him, red hair fanning out against the garish pattern of the throw quilt when he flops against the back cushion. Simon smiles a little and slides his hand up to link their fingers together.

"The way I see it, affirmations are the living's attempt at doing what the ULA was doing when I first joined," Simon thinks of a line of people smiling at him, of Bible verses, of family. He thinks of the television blaring news about a train attack. (He hadn't listened, hadn't wanted to know.) "Before it got so intense."

Kieren frowns, confused, curious. Nudges Simon for an explanation with a little squeeze of his hand. "What do you mean 'before'? It wasn't always that way? Violent?"

Simon shakes his head, sighing a hard breath out through his nose. The explanations dig their heels into his throat and stopper his voice. He'd been in denial about it for a long time, terrified of admitting to himself where the thing that saved him was going, terrified of letting it go and having nothing to hold on to and nothing to support him.

He glances down at Kieren's hand in his and traces random patterns on the backs of the knuckles with his finger. "No. No, it wasn't. When I first joined, there were hardly more than twenty of us. It was still religious. Still looked to the Bible for everything, but it wasn't like that. Back then, we were there to help other Redeemed learn how to accept themselves and love themselves as they were, in their new lives. We were there to support one another and show each other love. We spent a lot of time talking about our lives before and after, the things that killed us and what made us human. I heard stories from a lot of people. Most of those who came to the ULA came because they had nothing-- no one-- left. Their families or friends had rejected them and kicked them out, or they'd left out of fear. The ones who came to us were lost, and we were there to comfort them and help them feel like they had a family. Even Amy came looking for a family, looking for home, and we gave her one."

"So what happened?"

"Time. Anger. Bitterness. An increase in the number of members. People started getting angry that we were still hiding, that they couldn't get jobs or go outside. That the living were spitting in their faces or threatening them if they revealed themselves to be PDS. The ones who were most upset started to influence more people. And the Undead Prophet started making his videos, too. He got a wider audience, and a lot of them had fire in their veins and were more ready to act than we were before."

"Why didn't you leave them, then? Or were you okay with the violence?"

"No-- no. I wasn't. I just--" Simon chews his lip, breaths in short sharp breaths through his nose. His fingers dance nervously against Kieren's. "I didn't want to think about it. That it was all going pear-shaped from where it started. Didn't want to admit it. The ULA, they saved me."

"Saved you from what?"

Simon drops Kieren's hands and pushes himself off the couch, striding back and forth in the tiny space of Amy's living room, heels scraping lines into the antique garden of the carpet. He pushes nervous fingers against his eyes, into his hair, blows shakily into his cupped palms, shudders, dropping his arms heavily to his sides. He doesn't want to talk about it, doesn't want to think about it, _can't_.

Simon never had to do affirmations because Victor and John took him apart piece by shattered piece, dug pits into the porcelain of his soul, smashed some pieces into dusty fragments, and tried to put him back together only to rearrange the shards into something utterly unrecognizable when he finally looked in the mirror. Something with a long dark chasm of hurt hidden beneath a coat of false self-assurance.

He remembers staring at his own makeup-laden face in his father's bathroom mirror. Even behind the contacts, he could see how small he was, how all the fragments were mismatched and jagged and wrong. Even when the ULA folded him into its embrace, he clutched back at them with fingers stiffened by terror and shame. He remembers streaks of makeup across his fingers in the hotel from raking at his own face, clutching the air with horror. Hairline fractures widening, cracking under the pressure. He could pace across this carpet a thousand times and still find panic in the thought of those days between doctors and his new family, the infinite hurt that the thing that cradled him has cut him. Even now, he can see the fear slotted between starburst black and yellow-white. Even now, the words of affirmations he's only heard in sarcastic echo from Kieren's mouth make him flinch.

He flinches now, grimacing and twitching away at the painful reminder, at the way Kieren stares curiously at him, not knowing that he's pressing his fingers against a wound that has never closed. Someone is always taking something from him. Doctors bled him for information, his father bled him for the guilt of his mother's death, the ULA bled him for the word of God. Is he bleeding all over the carpet here for Kieren, the terror of the truth building in his chest?

Simon never had to do affirmations and he's not sure how much good they do him now. It's hard for him to think about the things he is without being terrified of himself. He's not sure he could look himself in the eye and believe that any of the things he's done are anything but his fault. He cannot repeat the words in their intended form and apply them to himself. _What I did in my untreated state was my fault. Mine._ Treated, untreated, it doesn't matter, it's all on him. You might walk and talk and think, but you are still evil. You are still a monster. You should not exist. You should not _be_. He's the one that should not be, should not be pacing back and forth in a house that is not his. Amy is the faultless one here, the innocent, and _she's_ gone. Simon doesn't deserve to keep going now that she's gone. He has a share in guilt on every side of this fight. The things he did, untreated or treated, bound by drugs or doctors or religion, are his fault.

Simon is a knife kept inside a music box, a syringe and spoon stuffed under a mattress, a gun hidden in the cut-out pages of a Bible. He's only ever been someone to hate.

"Saved you from what?" Kieren repeats himself, his eyes tracking the movement of feet across the floor. "Simon?"

Simon's fingers stutter against his thighs, he feels like his head is on a pendulum and maybe if he keeps moving he'll keep from thinking. "I-- Can we talk about this another time, Kieren? Please? I just can't, not right now."

Kieren sighs through his nose, an acquiescence, catches Simon's wrist this time and anchors him back down to the couch. "All right. But don't think I'm going to forget about it."

"I know you won't."

 

* * *

 

Once, walking together down the road to Amy's grave, Kieren wonders idly if they were meant to meet. He wonders if they were meant to help each other realize that you've always got a reflection, you've always got someone else who feels the same. When you hate yourself, you can't believe there's anyone else that feels the way you do. Like you're a mess of mixed-up impulses and chemical signals and you're starting to melt across the bathroom floor. You wonder if you're a failure, you just can't hack it. If you're the only one who finds life more terrible and difficult than death. So you drag yourself along by the tips of your raw, bleeding fingers. If you pretend you're not lost, if you pretend the walls that surround you feel like safety and home, you can pretend there isn't a fog waiting to creep up and kill you, an outside world that appears and disappears and drifts by like a lewdly-coloured void.

If you pretend yourself disappeared, you can almost pretend the blood pounding in your ears doesn't make you anxious to get it out, make it go quiet. You think, if you just imagine yourself a corpse for a little while, you forget whether you're alive or dead.

It's hard to keep up appearances when you hate yourself. When you can't look at your own wrists, much less your face each morning for fear of being reminded of everything you've learned to loathe. Funny how that seems to come with mirrors. Kieren has three mirrors scattered about his bedroom, reflections he's learned not to look at, spectres he's learned to block from the corners of his eyes until he's just another shadow in his own room. It's no accident. The mirrors are there to reflect the space around him, to pretend the room is bigger than it is, to pretend he can slip between the reflection of the bed and the bed itself until he doesn't exist there any longer, until he's just an imagined thought, until he doesn't have to pretend to breathe or eat or paint or look down at his own fear-filled body ever again.

Simon woke up to his own reflection staring himself in the face every morning, stood face to face with the black hole, the mange-ridden dog no one wanted to think about. The scars and bruises and tear tracks and track marks that stood out dark like a stain and added streaks of shame to the already dirty mirror. To his right and left, he was confronted with his own blank eyes, the empty shelves of his brain visibly dusty through the pale blue where they were once stacked high with pages. The way something behind his gaze clawed feebly for relief. By age sixteen he learned how to get dressed with his eyes closed, how to pack his school bag and hide his stash without ever opening his eyes.

Sometimes you've got to tear out your retinas in order to see again. Sometimes it's just tearing your own eyes out.

Now Kieren can stare at his own face in the bathroom mirror for a full sixty seconds before his chest starts to feel tight and he has to look away. Now Kieren can look at his wrists and feel only sadness at the fact that he felt he even had to do that, at the fact that, sometimes, he still feels he wants to do it again. He doesn't pretend he thinks it was the wrong thing to do, but he knows it's sad. He can look at his wrists without the squirm of shame in his stomach. He's starting to wear short sleeved shirts when it's warm.

Simon watches Kieren's growing comfort like it's a lighthouse perched on a cliff somewhere in a storm, and tries to pretend jealousy isn't beating waves at his insides. He may preach about pulling off the shackles of shame, he may insist on never hiding for the living, he may hold his head naked and high when he walks down the street, but he still closes his eyes when he gets dressed in the morning, pretending he doesn't know the reflection in the vanity mirror. Pretending it's perfectly normal to get dressed facing the wall, to shrug his shirt on every morning like his bones aren't a Jacob's Ladder torn apart and put back together in attempt to learn the secrets of heaven and earth. He knows he'll only find the bogeyman when he looks in the mirror, a terrified and broken thing, an unspeakable gasp of horror, a beastly dark flaying him open to display the rotting and broken down scaffolding within, a face with so many masks he's not sure which one is really him anymore. He'll only find a gaping maw and a cross he deserves to hang himself from, faultlines and faults cracking him to pieces and he can't deserve Kieren's unfettered affection, he doesn't deserve it, he's a monster. He would rather have no reflection and no soul than any of this, but he is not that kind of creature.

 

* * *

 

Sermons say without the love of God they are empty, without the blood of life they are empty, without the thought of humanity they are empty. Sermons say sin lives in the shadow that follows below them, the one they run from every waking moment. Sermons say sin will be the gun that shoots them all. Sermons say you cannot survive with sin in your bones and shadows in your head.

 

* * *

 

Kieren is rolling a stick of charcoal back and forth on a scratch piece of tracing paper, bottom lip trapped between his teeth as he tries to pull something to draw from his tired brain. He's already drawn Amy upwards of a dozen times, her laughing face constantly flashing through his mind.

She rattles around in his lungs. Her face has turned his hands into a printing press, stamping her likeness across everything he finds.

It reminds him too much of the aching autumn month after Rick's death, when he had done nothing but draw and paint the big brown eyes, the crooked smile, the candlelight-softened face again and again, unable to think of anything but the loss of the only pillar of hope he knew. It was the last thing he did before he died, draw Rick's portrait in shaky black lines, stained with tears and marred by moments when his hands shook too much with grief to draw straight. He's got Simon now, and his family, but the pain of Amy's death still comes over him in fresh waves when he thinks of her; his guilt over her death and the things they'd left unsaid and unsettled punches him in the chest when he passes any spot in Roarton that holds a memory of her.

He hears the door slam shut and the pounding of Jem's boots as she trots up the stairs and into her room, the double thud as she kicks them off onto the floor, waits for the third thud of her backpack. He stares at the dark smudges on his pale hands. Amy's not the only one he's been feeling guilt over. His parents, Jem, they've all been so good with him, made sacrifices he never expected them to make, supported him through so much. Jem especially, and he's been feeling guilty watching her suffer in silence, her head and the town her own private Tartarus, her own ball and chain. Kieren cannot rescue her, but at least he can lend her his strength up the hill. He leaves the charcoal stick on the table and rubs his fingers on his jeans as he crosses the threshold to knock on Jem's door. She yells an affirmation and he enters the dim, threat-lined teenage cave she's set up over the years, lit by lamps instead of candles and plastered with posters in place of graffiti.

Jem's sprawled out on her stomach on the bed, flipping a video game controller in her hands as she stares at the choice of games on her bookshelf. Kieren sits down beside her.

"Hey sis."

"Hey little bro."

"Not little."

"You are though," she insists, face twisting into a grimace when she realizes all her she has are zombie games-- ready-made traumatic flashbacks, just press Start-- and she tosses the controller down to the floor in clear annoyance. "Got to get better games. Can't do with the same shite over and over."

"How did your therapy session go?"

"All right, I suppose." Jem takes the train to the next town over once a week for her therapy sessions; Kieren wonders if maybe even the slight distance might help her to talk about it, to deal with it without the night terrors he knows she has, memories on every street corner in Roarton. "I've apparently got a lot of shit to sort out. Unsurprising, really, but it kind of sucks."

"But it's helping?" He only wants for someone in this generation to come out of this with minimal scarring, heart still beating.

"I think so. It's only my second session, Kier."

He knows Jem's got a lot to sort through. Bullet-riddled by the post-traumatic stress from her time with the HVF, she's already corroded and fragile, and all the stinging traumas recently have only made the edges sharper and more ragged. But there's also the nicks and dents from the relentless teasing of her early school days, and Kieren knows about the embarrassment she feels to be nineteen and only going through year eleven. Not to mention the trauma of her own brother killing himself alone in the dark and coming back home still half-dead just four years later. The further back he looks, the more she's been hurt by the things he did or didn't do, the results of his own inertia. Kieren plucks at the black and white duvet.

"Listen, Jem. I'm sorry I-- I'm sorry I let you down."

She frowns at him, sitting up and crossing her legs in front of her, brushing her hair out of her eyes to frown at him, confused. "You didn't do anything."

"Yeah, I did." He shakes his head and turns to face her; he doesn't want to get away with the things that should be weighing him down, the scars he should keep instead of giving to other people. "Back then, I stopped talking to you and I didn't let you talk to me. I put up walls and barbed wire and tied myself shut to keep everyone out. I know you all saw something was wrong and wanted to help, but I was all wrapped up in my own stuff, all knotted up in silence, and I thought-- I didn't want to be a burden, then. I thought I would weigh you all down. And then I walked out and-- Just, I'm sorry, okay? That you had to deal with all that."

Jem's smile is sad when her eyes flick up to his. "Thanks, Kier."

"And if you need anything, just let me know, yeah? Don't make a rope out of the things you think you can't say, okay? You can always say them to me."

Because he knows it's the way of his family, and perhaps the way of the whole town: pain is a ritual conducted in private, a symphony on mute, whips that hit shoulders in the dark, heads tilted backward so tears won't ever fall, and every mouth is sewn shut. Not a word, not a sound, no indication of the sheer number of broken hearts behind every front door.

Jem nods and picks at a loose thread on her purple jumper, the Walker habit of destroying sleeves when chewing fingernails is not an option. "The doc says I should start connecting more with people my age, people not associated with the HVF. I would but, well, they do make it a bit difficult. I think I would've liked to get to know Amy better but..."

Kieren ducks his head to look at her. "Hey. It wasn't your fault."

This time she lifts her head and stares straight back at him, gaze clear. "Wasn't yours, neither."

He can't look at her.

 

By the time Kieren gets out of the house and is picking his hobbling way back to the bungalow, he can do nothing but imagine all the ways it could have gone. He would rather have died instead of her. He was the one who had quietly decided his role in the production of existence was a useless one, obsolete. He was the one who had slipped out of sight and taken himself away from it all so willingly. She was a fighter, she had always been a fighter, and unlike him, she hadn't ever _wanted_ to go. He only more than had. What if he had died and not her? What if he'd been the one to step in front of the knife? What if Phillip had stepped in front of it? Simon? Jem? His dad?

He couldn't wish death on those who didn't look on it like a mark on a calendar, crossing off the days as it gets closer. He couldn't wish death on the ones who tried so hard to never look the months ahead.

Every scenario only gives him a fresh pang of grief. It was his fault, really. He'd let her go, he'd gone back home without stopping to ask her how she was doing, without stopping to clear the air between them. And now he'll never know what she really thinks of him and Simon. He'll never get to tell her how sorry he is about going behind her back, about hurting her. He'll never be able to tell her she was the best friend he ever had. He'll never tell her she made him better. If he had asked her to stay, just for a little while, and talk to him, maybe they could have avoided all this.

He kicks at the gravel on the ground as he walks, hurt boiling his brain. His useless but relentlessly automatic breathing is erratic and sharp, a horrible false imitation of sobs. PDS sufferers can't cry; the small tidepools their tear ducts produce are only enough for a thin film across their sclera. Nowhere close to the oceans needed for real tears of any sort. Tears are denied them, and with them, yet another form of desperately needed emotional release.

Crying, eating, drinking, wanking, touching, breathing, drugs. It's as if they're forced to stuff themselves full of ache, embalmed by emotions too much to handle, all pressure and no release, until something happens and they split open with the hurt and are carted away to treatment centre to be "dealt with" as noncompliant. Angry fists beating against the glass, tearing apart their alarm-orange Give Back Scheme bibs, it isn't fair, none of this is fair.

There are shadows that lurk in the pause inside of them, nameless, sightless, groping. Old echoes of sense memories and bad habits. There are shadows that sit weeping and shadows that try to escape. Past and present untold, curled in corners of their skins. It's no wonder most of them wake screaming in the middle of the night.

Simon is approaching the bungalow from the opposite direction when Kieren gets there, and they meet each other just beyond the yard. Simon stops on the pavement and gives Kieren a once-over, a pinch between his brows. He seems to notice the hitch in his breath, the tiredness in his eyes, the stillness of him. He twitches like he wants to pull Kieren close but has thought better of it.

"You all right? What's wrong?"

"I'm not... I don't do grief very well." Kieren admits, lips twisting together and pushing to the side.

Simon nods like it's what he expected. Of course it's what he expected, since waking they've been doing nothing else but mourn in undertones to their strange half-existence. "No one does."

And maybe it's supposed to be this heavy, the way loss fills all the space in his body with lead, maybe it's like this for everyone and you're just supposed to get used to it and stand up and walk away, but Kieren has no proper context for an appropriate reaction to death.

Simon moves to put his hand on Kieren's shoulder, but Kieren shakes his head and steps back, eyes cast down. He can't do this. Not right now, can't deal with this kind of comfort. The last time he'd had to deal with a grief as thick as this, it had ended in the lonely darkness of a cave, gashes in his wrists as he tried to rid himself of the hurt in the only way he knew how. Last time he felt like this, all he could stand to deal with was extremes; it was the in-between areas that were too painful to consider. Last time he felt like this, the only way he knew how to cope was permanent impermanence. He opens his mouth to say so, but Simon beats him to it.

"You're doing better than you could be, you know."

"I'd rather not be doing anything at all," he mumbles to Simon's chest, unable to reach his eyes. "Last time, it trapped me and I... This time I keep digging holes and making windows but it's so much work. I'd rather it just go away."

"But it won't, you know that. You're doing your best."

"Still..."

Simon shakes his head firmly, cups a hand around the back of Kieren's neck and ducks his head to stare him in the face. "Still nothing. You're strong, Kieren. You're incredible."

Kieren can't help but shrink back from the praise. It's not even something he thinks about, the running away, the dodging compliments that make him feel better than he thinks he deserves. It's a reflex, a flinch away from the words that sounded so wrong for so long. He's been trying harder to believe them recently, but sometimes it's a little too difficult to bear. Especially on days like this, when all that's in his head is guilt and grief and what if's. He ducks away and moves past Simon along the walkway to the house.

"Let's get inside, yeah?"

"Yeah. Yeah." Simon sounds like he wants to say more, but once they get inside he drops whatever it was and instead retrieves the neurotryptaline case from the kitchen and returns to the living room, handing it to Kieren and dropping down onto the couch. "How's your sister doing?"

Kieren sets up the med gun with slow, fine movements of his long artist's fingers, lets the subject change slide. "All right. Her therapist says she's got a lot to sort out. No surprise there. But she's strong. Even with all the shite she's gone through, she's doing pretty good."

"That's good. I heard there was another clash in Manchester between a ULA group and some HVF. How'd she take that?"

"I don't know, she didn't mention it. Maybe she doesn't know yet. I hope she doesn't. She needs to build herself back up again, and something like that might break all the parts she's put up so far. Here, come here."

Simon drops his head to his chest, baring the back of his neck and Kieren tugs the collar of his shirt down gently, biting his lip. He knows there's some sort of scar or mark on Simon's back; he can see the very edge of it when he administers the neurotryptaline. But Simon won't talk about it, has never even mentioned it. Kieren's not sure he wants to know. Still, the unassuming submission and exposure indicates an incredible level of trust, and sometimes Kieren feels knocked over the head by it. The most serious relationship he's had only ever existed in the candlelit fantasy land of the cave, nothing more. He doesn't know how to do this. He doesn't know how to carry something as strange and laden as Simon. He wants to, he desperately wants to, he's just not sure if he can. Not without dropping some pieces or breaking something. It's a frightening thought.

Simon flinches as the shot of neurotryptaline surges through his system, letting out a strained puff of air and rolling his shoulders against the shudder of chemical energy. "Thanks, Kieren."

He sets up a second shot as Kieren joins him on the couch, scooting closer so Simon can reach his neck. Simon places one gentle hand firm against his shoulder and administers the shot. Kieren flinches and shakes, gags a little, stills. Simon's arm hooks around his chest to hold him upright, fingers pressing solidly against the still spot where his heart once beat.

"Alright?"

Shaking his head to clear the swirling chemicals, he straightens up and turns to look at Simon. "Yeah. Yeah, m'good. Happens sometimes."

A hand catches Kieren's wrist as he moves to stand up. "Easy. Easy. Just sit for a minute, yeah? Be sure you're okay."

"You sound like my dad." His family's been hovering over him since the Blue Oblivion, since Amy's death, all of it feeling new and yet somehow old, like they're looking for doom in the ghost, waiting in the wings for some sort of encore of his living life, like they know the marrow never lets go of its anguish, that thought will cling to dead limbs and memories collect in the sockets of the skull, and all of it will add up to his mind shaking down or the mutually assured destruction in the terrible trembling of his body and the emotional habits of old. His right hand seems to vibrate where it sits on his knee.

"That's because both your dad and I want you around. You can love a shade, you can love something invisible or senseless, but it's not like it'll be able to tell. We don't want that kind of life. It's no use to us if you disappear." Simon's expression is urgent, sincere. "You're not just a pretty face, y'know. You're important, Kieren."

"I guess." He can still only barely look himself in the eyes in the bathroom mirror. Sure, he's okay with baring himself for others, refusing to cover up for the living, but even alive he never found the ability to look at himself with anything other than sad disgust. He knows he's already better than he was when he first came back; he doesn't throw a towel over the bathroom mirror anymore or flinch from his reflection in windows. Still, it's hard.

Simon shakes his shoulder gently, peering into his face. "You're amazing, Kieren. I wish you'd realize that."

Kieren feels a wash of affection for the man beside him, a gentle current that seems to warm him despite his lack of sensory perception. No one has ever said anything like that to him. Even Rick was scared of compliments in abstraction, like somehow the idea would make its way over to Bill Macy and tattle, like sincerity might break the lie. And the rest of Roarton was more likely to kick him into the dirt and call him a faggot. It's strange to hear such sweet confidence. He brings his hand up to Simon's face and kisses him, and wonders if they could trade pieces this way, back and forth until they're both whole again.

 

* * *

 

The tape deck hiss and Morrissey's melancholy voice wake Simon later than he'd like. He pads out of the room in his t-shirt and boxers to investigate why his oily teenage years seem to be permeating the house. Kieren is stretched across the sofa in the sun-filled living room, his feet up on the arm, a sketchbook across his thighs. He looks up when Simon lifts his legs and sits down under them, settling his feet in his lap.

"Sorry, didn't mean to go nosing about. I just wanted something to listen to other than Amy's gran's crappy records." Simon shrugs, doesn't matter much to him, leans over to look at Kieren's sketchpad, which is quickly snatched away and pressed to his thin chest. Kieren cocks his head towards the way the sounds of his past hang in the air, melodic flypaper with snatches of memories stuck to static-y riffs and verses. "Did you used to listen to this stuff often?"

"Who, The Smiths?" Simon nods, drumming his fingers against Kieren's ankles and sitting back against the couch again. "Yeah, I guess."

"It suits you, I think. Very poetic but also kind of dark."

Simon considers this, remembering ugly boyhood curtains and the shivering grunge of back alleys, wandering the outskirts of Dublin with a walkman in his pocket, woozy evenings in empty bathtubs with a ring of grime round the inside or bleak mornings on someone's stained mattress. "I listened to them a lot before I died. I think it described how I was feeling when I couldn't. Some things can't be described when you're experiencing them, even with a literature degree."

"You have a degree?" Kieren shifts, bending his knees and pushing his bare toes under Simon's thigh, balancing his sketchbook on his legs. He shakes his head slowly. "Sometimes I forget you're so much older than me."

"Doesn't matter now, does it? Dead men don't age."

"Guess not."

They lapse into silence, and Simon watches Kieren's face as he concentrates on the words washing over them. Morrissey hands Simon the words, laments, "How can they see the love in our eyes and still they don't believe us?" The familiarity strikes as it always does, an ache. He wonders why he ever stopped listening to this music that seems to always have the words he doesn't. It's times like this he wishes he could just recite other people's words in order to convey the fumbling, inarticulate feelings and desires that have always driven their heels into his throat and covered his eyes and refused to yield to his need for expression. He can look at a person and know their feelings in a moment, empathize with them and react appropriately, but his own brain is a mystery. He's never been able to tell people the way he feels, not in the right way. It has always been too much or not enough, and never ever the right words from his own mouth.

"Hang on." Simon hurries to the bedroom and back, ejecting the first tape and sliding the one he's just retrieved into the dock. He presses play and settles back onto the couch, bracing himself for the ache of his past to hit him as the album hisses to life.

Kieren deserves to hear this. Simon's learned so much about him from Amy, from himself, and Kieren knows so very little about him. It's nerve-wracking, exposing his old self, his hurting self, his messed up and addicted and shameful self, to anyone who has the ability to hurt him. He clenches his fists at his knees and looks at Kieren from the corner of his eye. He cannot praise his old life in song, cannot beat and pound for an existence that was half unreal, full of equal pain and pleasure that he could never separate, an existence he could never identify as death or life or something terrible in between. But he can listen to the words of others that he played to drown out himself. He can force the words out of his throat, make his old life leave its dusty nest so _someone_ knows, so Kieren can see him for what he was and what he is.

"I used to walk around the streets of Dublin and listen to this song. Used to cross the Liffey with it playing, like it would help me be okay with feeling shit all the time. It didn't, of course, which is why I was going northside in the first place. Used to cross the bridge like I was some sort of double agent, like crossing a border meant I wasn't me anymore, you know? Like I didn't have to stand up straight anymore or read the books I couldn't care about, not after I'd found something that worked better than books. I'd catch a ride with a friend or take the bus to Killester or Cabra and get me stuff there. I made a mix tape once, used to listen to it when I was shooting up alone."

He shrugs, twitches his head as he struggles to express himself properly, the memories, the bleak empty alley of his mind that he filled with drugs and music and words like black plastic bags, his thoughts shouting from window to window, groaning from the ground, reaching, reaching, grasping at the air. He can see the black marks on his arms stark against his skin, a reminder. "I felt like I was always empty, but at the same time, I thought I was going to explode from feeling too much. The music somehow captured that."

Kieren's fingers tap against his sketchbook to the music and he nods. "It does. It's like the sound being stuck."

They're silent, the mournful crooning voice between them crying out for Armageddon like it's already crashing around his heart. It's close to home, for both of them, for both lives. Lungfuls of yearning trapped in their burning chests, heads underwater and waiting for the blackout.

Simon shakes himself slightly, turning away from the tape player but not turning it off. "What did you listen to, Kieren?"

"Me, I listened to heavy metal, I guess. Rob Zombie, Misfits, Black Flag, that sort of stuff. Not so much for the lyrics like you, though. Guess I just wanted to cover up the noise in me own head. Used to turn it up till I couldn't hear a thing and the window was shaking." Kieren's lips twist sideways, regretful, remembering. "When I had art block I'd sit on the floor of my closet in the dark and listen to it as loud as it could go and pretend I didn't exist. After Amy went away the first time, I tried listening to it again like I used to, but I guess it wasn't the same."

"Yeah," Simon agrees softly. "My music didn't help me much, either. I wanted it to, but..."

"Yeah."

 

* * *

 

When Amy leaves him standing at the Roarton train station, Kieren is a whirl of thoughts and emotions, the imprint of her hug and clacking of train wheels spinning in his head, overlapping with the nervous genuine smile of the boy he used to love, the flash-faded memory of his hand on Kieren's shoulder. But one thing was the present and one was the past and now what will become of it all? His best friend, his only friend is leaving and the world that was gaining hints of light every time he saw her is melting back into gray. He plods along the road back home, thoughts torn between already missing Amy and trying to figure out how to talk to Rick again.

When his garage is in sight, the garish PDS message is underlined by everything he was and everything he gained and lost and gained again and suddenly Kieren is lurching towards the body, letting his knees give way beside it, feeling despair well up in his chest and wishing not for the first time that he could still cry. It only gets worse from there.

Even well after his father's confession, Kieren finds it hard to look at the world the way he'd be trying to see it with Amy around. Her energy was enough to make flowers grow in the muddy graveyard of his insides, enough to shatter the ice that clung to his ribcage and frosted his lungs, enough to light the cave that seemed to always blind his eyes. And now she's been carried away towards a new life and he's here, stuck here, trapped here. There's no Rick this time. There's no getting blindingly drunk in the woods to pretend everything's okay, there's no quiet whispers to Jem in the night about how much school sucks, there's no day trips with Amy making silly jokes all the while, there's no Rick and no Amy and he's alone.

Everything is crumbling, sliding back down the slope to the way it used to be. Kieren finds a job at the Legion, but he can barely look up from the taps each night as whispers close in around him and eyes pin him like a wriggling insect.

He closes his eyes when he polishes the glasses so he can't see his backward, distorted reflection looking back at him.

Every way he turns, he can see the old hate mingled with the new, a twisted monster that looms over him, accusing him of being the worse monster, the darker monster, the dangerous one. Everywhere he turns, he sees Rick; Rick's smiles, Rick's tears, Rick's stupid jokes, Rick's big hands flinging orange peels at him in the street, Rick nearly crying with laughter as he rides the rickety trolley down the hill. He can't enter the house from the front anymore, can't pass the garage with his eyes open.

It feels like his world is ending all over again, when it was just starting to put itself back together.

There's a shadow falling, flickers of ideas through his mind, just enough to have a notion, not enough to grasp at a reality. Familiar shades from before, pressing their faces against the glass to peer in at him. He hides in his bedroom, hides in his head, hides in his inability to form thoughts adequate for his emotions. He stops talking to people at work, stops talking to his family; sometimes he won't say anything at all. Something inside him starts to wonder how it might have been if he had never come back. Rick would still be here, and he, Kieren, would be safely underground, unable to cause any more pain to anyone else.

He doesn't realize how far he's slid until he's home alone one day, rummaging through the shed for a hammer to hang a new wall decoration his mum bought for the kitchen the other day. A packet of utility blades slides off the shelf he's digging through and lands at his feet. He considers them, picking absently at his stitching, considers the trilling wires in his veins, the rushing call in the back of his head that tells him how effective it is, the black sluggish blood that hums lowly under inveterate scars, his habit from secondary school that carried him through life, to death, back again. Thoughts in his head like a whisper through a loudspeaker. It worked before, didn't it? It helped before, didn't it?

He knows he's always been sick. Sick head, sick heart, maybe it's his soul that's sick. Maybe he is a candle just not meant to burn, snuffed out by the breath of tomorrow and all the fear that comes with it. He needs no sound and fury; it's more than enough to be empty without it. Amy and Rick, they were the ones that brought substance to him, brought light to his million shadows. They've winked out, faded out into the distance, and he's left with nothing but his family's smiling masks watching him like he's an undead record stuck on the same song, just the past come back to repeat itself.

And here he is, repeating himself.

What would he say to them? "I'm nothing but empty highways, a protective casing for meaningless sludge, a machine working on a worn-out emergency generator. I am this quintessence of dust, this quivering ghost. I'm less me than I ever was before. I pretend for you, I pretend for me, but we all know it's not really working. We all know I'm dead inside, in my lungs, in my heart, in my head. We all know I'm supposed to be mostly dead, so why aren't I? They said I wasn't supposed to feel pain. So what is this that has my whole body in its hold? What is this that feels like it's trying to destroy me from the inside out when I'm already half-stuck? Why won't it just _stop_?"

The little metal sheets clatter against the box as he picks it up, dumps one out, tosses the box back onto the shelf like it burns. He turns his left wrist up against him, a shadow of the shadow, a mark of memory, a siren call in a candlelit cave. His last syllable calls for a repeat.

The blade cuts easily through his stitching, through his bloodless skin, nothing. No rush, no relief, no blackish blood, not even pain. Maybe he just didn't do it right this time? Maybe the other? He tries his right wrist, the razor a lottery ticket clenched in two fingers. It does nothing but make more obvious his inability to deal with anything the right way. He'll put his palms down on a hot stove when every other person screams at him to stop.

It doesn't matter that he's ready to feed himself poison, to light himself on fire just to char all the dead skin away. The line stretches not to the crack of doom, stretches not to nothingness, stretches to nothing and only lengthens the list of reasons he shouldn't have come back, only points an arrow along his still veins back to the dead silence of his own heart screaming 'This is the culprit, this here is why you should never become or unbecome, if you can help it. If you do, _this_ is what you'll be.'

"Fuck." Disappointment and anger and fear and anguish surge in a great wave in his chest, leaping up into his head and everything is still building up and rising and there can never be release and he flings the razor across the shed, hands coming up to clench against his temples as he screams into his knees. "Fuck!"

He stays curled on the floor of the shed for a long time, gasping useless breaths into his functionless lungs. Some biological habits never die, some brain functions never quit, even if the body can't react anymore, even if the skin separates with no consequences other than a never-ending anxiety attack and eyes that would well with tears if only they could, if _only_. He hauls himself to his feet and lurches out, folding his arms against his chest and pretending he can't feel the phantom incision like war veterans feel phantom limbs.

Dr. Russo stitches him up again with a reproachful expression. Kieren watches the threads close his dead skin tight, pull him together as if the thinner line will make his heart hurt less, as if the smaller gash will make up for the increased length, as if he can hide all his secrets and all the little pricks under his skin, pushing it down and holding it closed until everyone else forgets and he can deal with it or not all on his own. Russo opens his mouth, eyebrows curved in concern, but Kieren shakes his head, still watching the stitching pulling him shut.

"It was fucking stupid, I know. I just-- got upset. I won't do it again. No one needs to know. Please."

Russo sighs, and what Kieren wouldn't give to be able to do that and _really_ feel it. He nods. "Just one time. Talk to Shirley, Kieren. She'll be happy to help. You know she will, mate."

Kieren doesn't talk to Shirley. He wears long sleeves all the time, hides the ache under his skin, wishes he could feel, wishes he couldn't _feel_. He again knows hatred for his own being, no longer as sensitive to feeling as to sight. He starts to wonder what's the next best thing. Foxes caught in traps chew through their own ankle joints to escape. Will he have to gnaw off his own leg? If he can't get out of here, how can he get out of _here_?

He needs to be anything else but him, anywhere else but here. He needs to leave the place he left, get away from the place he ran from. Roarton is killing the dead man as much as it killed him when his body was still breathing.

 

* * *

 

It's like this: two armies of empty men face off in a field, in a graveyard, in a wood, in a hollow place. The blind battle the breathless for the broken jaw of this clawing, wretched existence. Empty men fall emptier met with bullets, met with teeth. It's like this: two empty men find another with so much nothing left it's fallen backward into something. Two empty men rub his ribs together to make a flame. It's like this: they are half-empty, half-full, bits and pieces and halves. Life was long and now it's stolen, longer. There is movement, there is stillness; they exist in the pause.

It's like this: with fire comes the shadows.

 

* * *

 

Amy's grave has fresh flowers on it from Simon and a new drawing from Kieren, little tokens that they cannot bring themselves to stop leaving, even after knowing there is only darkness in death. Even after knowing the flowers are only for grieving the ones left behind. They're walking hand in hand back to the bungalow through mist that scatters about them like falling white noise, silence between them, thoughts bundling them up inside their own tired heads. Simon is watching the rise and fall of his own feet. Kieren tosses his head and makes a noise like he's miffed at himself.

"What are you thinking about?"

"I'm thinking about how I'm glad I'm missing Amy. I'm glad that I'm sad she's gone, y'know? With Rick, I didn't miss him. It was like a black hole had sucked everything away and all I knew was that he was gone and I had nothing left. I wasn't sad he was gone, I didn't miss him; I just collapsed. At least this time there's something there."

"You've gotten stronger."

"Maybe."

"Maybe you hoped Rick would come back to you and you lost him twice. Amy was already here, and maybe you weren't afraid of loss anymore."

"I've lost too much to not be afraid." Kieren's thinking of the cave, the body leant against the door to his garage, Jem's tears shining on her cheeks, Amy's blood staining her fingernails. Simon's thinking of Kieren's face in the hospital, the confused hurt in his expression. Kieren shakes his head, brows furrowed. "That's not it. Maybe I'm realizing there are people out there different from us who will still look at us. Maybe I'm realizing the living are learning from us what living really means, that you don't need a heartbeat and working lungs."

"They could, maybe. If they didn't hunt us like we were the grim reaper himself," Simon accuses through the locked door of his teeth."If they saw that other kinds of lives are possible. If they didn't look in our faces and see all their fears of death and decay reflected back at them."

"I think," Kieren replies haltingly, "What looks like life in one place looks like death in another. It's a matter of perspective, place."

An acquiescent nod, and Simon's jaw unlocks. "We're proof that you can come back from death and still not know what death is. It scares them."

"Exactly. To exist is to die, and as far as we know, they don't get our second chances."

"Which is why--"

A glob of black bile lands on Simon's cheek, just under his his right eye, leaving a dark streak like a scar as he wipes it away. Kieren starts, tugging him to a surprised stop.

"What--"

Zoe's face is twisted in a grimace, teeth bared in a wolf-snarl as she spits rough-throated words towards Simon, shoving herself between them. "And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. You will be judged, Simon! Your little group isn't big enough to take us on; the messages they send won't stop us. The Prophet knows the things you have done."

Kieren shakes his head with a heavy sigh. He's too tired for this, for all the silences and symbolism he thought had left when the ULA disappeared from the bungalow. It's too much to be grieving Amy, worrying over Jem, watching Simon falling dark, and now being stuck in the middle of some political debate he can't agree with. "Piss off, Zoe. Leave us alone."

"You're useless now as well," She turns on him, pointing a finger, then swings back to Simon, gesturing to Kieren's confused form behind her. "You turn your back on us for thirty pieces of silver, mind you go looking for a good solid branch or we'll do it for you."

Simon's face turns to stone. He's scratched one loyalty off his palms, branded another across his tongue; he spits coals. He presses his face close to hers, hopes the sparks will scar her. "Leave. Us. Alone. I will burn your ropes and your trees to the ground if I have to."

She stares at him, his threat against hers, but he's withstood more stares than she, he walks upright with the half-crushed spine of a suicide victim, he's felt the echo of scalpels at night and still slept, he carries the weight of a bullet in his shoulder and a static-masked recording around his neck. He has spaces between his fingers now where there used to be a fist; she cannot fathom the idea of being too frightened to be angry, she cannot build knees from nothing or a spine from naught but painless automatic faith. Her anger is too taught, and passion without reason breaks under passion held upright by past. Zoe backs down, spitting at Simon's feet and swiping a glare back for Kieren as well before stomping off towards her own house.

Simon grinds the dull grey spittle into the pavement with the toe of his shoe, holds out his hand for Kieren to fill his spaces again and Kieren takes it.

"What the hell was that about?"

Simon shakes his head, pulls them both once again in the direction of the bungalow. "They still believe in the shadows on the wall. I did something the ULA would not approve of. I'm not welcome, anymore."

He does not say that he's not sure he can believe in the religion he once bowed to. He does not say he cannot look to the ULA or the living, both unequal laws unto a savage race that hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know nothing but their own greed and malice and inhuman hunger. He does not say he can taste ashes on the back of his teeth, guilty dust saliva cannot wipe away. He does not say the tree could be for both of them; you still need as much wood to make a cross as for a gallows.

 

* * *

 

It is autumn, and they are sixteen, and driving, sneaking out at night, drinking, pretending the night air that numbs the day is all still new, still giddy.

They take Janet's car because it's quieter, easier, drive out to the forest with the lights off until the road becomes nothing but dirt and leaves and the lights come on, turning the dark sentries of trees into hulking voids in the night. They make fires in the dark with Rick's lighter and old leaves, spread their jackets on the ground and sit back to back. Kieren has a backpack full of drinks.

A bottle each, just one. Enough to fill up the bits that are missing, cauterize the holes in their throats where the words go unsaid.

The hours drag on each night, long enough because you can't see time in the dark. Your heartbeat ticks the seconds down but it's hard to keep time when the skin starts to scar over, when you're talking ceaselessly to cover up the truth.

When they go back, Rick drives, every time. He knows the roads better than Kieren, always has. Kieren only knows how to get to the cave and back without getting them lost. He's never cared so much about direction like Rick.

A smattering of pebbles against his window and Kieren is tiptoeing down the stairs, out the door, tugging his jacket over his jumper over his shirt over the things he doesn't want anyone to see. Rick is leaning against the car with one swollen eye, a bruise on his jaw slowly reddening.

A fight, he tells Kieren, with Bill. A bad one. Kieren gets into the passenger seat, reaches out and touches the corner of Rick's eye with two fingers. Rick hisses softly. Kieren puts his fingers in his mouth and thinks he can taste the bruise.

In the dark, his shoulder blades digging into Kieren's, Rick wonders what it might be like when they get out of here. He wants to believe they'll have a life. You'll go to art school, you will. I'll...do something. I'll do something. He can't keep me here.

Rick's bottle is mostly gone. Kieren's is halfway there. He shares.

"You can do what you want, you know," Kieren voice crackles in the dark. "You can have a life. You're not me. People like you. You're not dirty."

I can try, but. There's nowhere to go.

It hangs there between them. Rick sucks blood off his scabbing knuckles. The back of his neck is burning hot when Kieren pushes his forehead against it. They pull out their knives and dig listless at the dirt. Rick puts an ember out under his thumb.

They're drunk, laughing around lungfuls of glass, Rick's mouth tastes like the blood on his knuckles and the mud on both their hands. Rick uses his teeth like he's going to claim him, Kieren's fingers push into him like nails, like an accident. They pull away when there's no more alcohol or salt to cover up the taste.

Rick drives back, but it's different this time; his hands grip the wheel like claws and his eyes are empty beasts. He takes the turns without looking, without a pause. Kieren knows what he wants to do. Kieren knows what it means to set your jaw like that, to have teeth in your chest, to look for the blackest parts of the shadows. He can see Rick looking at the trees, the way he wonders if maybe that tree is the right one to wind the car around. Like a ribbon, Kieren thinks, or a perfect fit. They're drunk, after all. He can see the way Rick eyes every trunk when the headlights slither over it. He doesn't mind. It almost scares him, the way he can see the grains of wood so starkly, inches away at each turn, then it doesn't. Maybe it's familiar.

In the bluish, too-early light he can see the white smoke coming from the church, some sacred sacrifice burning itself up inside a decrepit old cave. He wants to laugh. A tree, an accident, Bill Macy, the kids at school, illness, old age, they'll all be dead and it won't matter. Just buzzard food, just new soil, just a cold bare bones grin under the earth. What sort of god would exist in a place like this?

There is a rosary hanging from the rearview mirror. Rick doesn't even blink when Kieren yanks it down and throws it out the window into the darkness. There is blood rubbed into their skin and mud in their gums and they all do what they have to for survival.

The road turns to stone, the anger turns to granite, and Rick goes silent and solid again. Kieren gets out blocks before his house and walks back in the cold. He's forgotten his coat. He thinks of Vicar Oddie and his fire, some ancient, twisted notion that an invisible hand turns the world and will someday save all the soul-starved hyenas that shed blood to get in the good books, the sad sacks that light candles and question nothing. Everyone working hard to die and go to the light even if there isn't one, everyone hoping they're not just chemical functions laughing at each other in the waiting room. Everyone hopes they'll go somewhere blinding when the world ends. Disgusting excuses for sad habits and bad decisions. If there was a God, Kieren thinks, trees would be in front of every bend in the road: _God is dead; of His pity for man hath God died_.

 

* * *

 

Living at the bungalow is terrifying. The house is a sea of guilt with no low tide, no rocks to stand on to keep his head above water. Simon exists within each room, but he cannot look up from his feet, cannot look around him, must concentrate on treading water for as long as possible, must pretend he's not drowning.

After the memorial, Frankie gave him flowers with an apologetic expression, mumbled to her shoes that she was done with the ULA and sorry about Amy. He'd only nodded, smiled like his head was full of straw, shut the door on the back of her bowed head. The flowers sit in a vase in the hallway, dead and brown and wilted and he's afraid to touch them, like maybe when the petals crumble to pieces on the floor, everything else will too. He won't throw them away.

Instead, he wanders from room to room, picking things up and putting them back down, afraid to move the things she last touched but too restless not to. Trying to convince himself she'd care, trying to reassure himself she wouldn't.

He drifts through the house when he can't sleep, mouthing aborted apologies and pleas into the soundless dark. He'd yanked the ULA poster off the wall when he got back from the memorial. Some of the wallpaper tore down with it, a scar across her home, making it less of a home now and more a retreat into abandoned enemy territory. Bullets are scattered on the floor and he keeps tripping.

He feels like his memory is a photograph processing backward. In the kitchen all he can see is Amy coming to him after the group exchanged rising stories back at the commune, coming to him with her hands twisted in her skirt and a frown on her face and asking him What about our deaths? Don't our deaths define who we might become, too? And he remembers a few days later, she'd asked him again, shown him the lesions that covered her torso like the bruises of fists and asked him about his last thought and all he could say was I don't know, relief maybe, I can't remember, and her expression had gone from sad curiosity to something strange and understanding. She'd hugged him like she could finally give him comfort if only she could pull him close enough to push past their numb bodies' self-imposed distance.

In the living room he remembers her excited smile, the rapid-fire monologues about how excited she was about Simon meeting her BDFF, how wonderful her little Kieren was, how he would adore him. Her pale eyes alight with life (and she mentioned once that no matter how optimistic she was before, she never had energy like this). The way she'd spun around and around, flung her arms to the sky, I've never felt so awake in my life!

In her bedroom all he sees is her dress, stained with her own red blood, the gash in her chest widening, breaking open, cracking open and peeling back, away from her, exposing her pink organs, lungs poised to inflate, heart red and full and bleeding, and the blood spilling to the floor, a long, thin rivulet snaking over the tiles to his feet, pointing, _it's him, it's him, he killed me, he's the reason I can no longer smile and laugh and live_.

And, _god_ , he loved her. She was his friend without ulterior motive. Not a single smile or hug hid something she wanted from him. He hadn't had a friendship like that since he was a child, hadn't been able to love someone without the fear of having to give up some piece of himself. But she had loved him for no other reason than the fact that he existed, and he had loved her because she was _Amy Dyer_ and he could see how much she loved, how hard she worked to stay positive and cheerful. He could watch her from the next room and see how much she needed to see that everyone loved her just as much as she loved them.

Simon imagines they could have told her together. She would have been sad, would have been hurt, but Amy Dyer doesn't give up the ones she loves that easily, not if they still love her. He imagines they would have gone on day trips together, like the ones she described going on with Kieren. He imagines the bungalow warm without warmth. Maybe their hearts would have grown to match their brains, maybe they'd learn to rearrange themselves so everything fit.

Instead, she figured it out on her own, maybe saw them once when they weren't paying attention. They hid from her and let her down and still Amy Dyer bequeathed her stupid, ugly, cluttered, wonderfully Amy home to them. Called them "love birds" in her will. Gave them her blessing without ever being asked. Gave them her blessing even though they hurt her. Gave them her blessing and sealed it with "extra special" and there's no way he could dig down deep enough into the earth to bring her back when her blood was _red_ and her eyes were _brown_ and she _wasn't smiling_.

Sometimes he whispers half-finished Hail Mary's to the house, wondering if maybe he can coat the walls with enough apologies maybe they'll congeal into redemption. There is no other reason for her to be dead. He almost wonders if the man in the skeleton mask knew that if Simon couldn't take one person he loved, he'd be sure to take the other. Simon should have gone back to the bungalow, should have looked for her, should have told her about them and told her about Him and told her about the knife. Should have, should have, didn't. The things he says to the empty air are quiet and meaningless. He cannot ask forgiveness from a headstone scarred with a name.


	2. In A Handful Of Dust

Sometimes, Kieren hates this. When he was alive, his own head held him strapped to the ground, froze him in place so he found himself unable to do anything. This time, it's his body, the way he doesn't breathe anymore, the way his eyes and skin look, they way everyone knows what he is now. Everything he wants to do requires registration, forms, restrictions. It is difficult, as a PDS sufferer, to be unable to get a licence or drive, especially when your mum asks you to do the shopping. Kieren is glad his arms can't get tired, the bags hanging off them don't feel heavy. Still, they're unwieldy and annoying and he sees his chance as he turns the corner. He knocks on the door to the bungalow with an elbow, holding out his bag-laden arms when Simon opens the door.

"Help me? Mum made me go shopping."

Simon locks the door and takes some of the groceries from Kieren's arms, falling into step beside him as they make their way to the Walker house. "You didn't ask Jem to drive you?"

"Didn't want to bother her. Sometimes I feel like I'm a phantom limb, you know? Dead, but annoying and always in the back of her mind, and she's got a right to have her own life. She's got schoolwork and things and besides, I think she's sick of driving me places. "

"Imagine that."

Kieren snorts, knocking his shoulder into Simon's. They pretend they can feel it, pretend it smarts a little. Being with Simon makes Kieren smile, makes him feel happier and more solid than he has in years. He doesn't need the groceries or screaming music or his own exposed blood to hold him to the ground; he's starting to realize he can do it all on his own. Something his expanding inside him, pressing against his empty lungs like it's trying to finally fill them with something new. But when he turns, Simon is walking with his head down, face darkened and eyes dragging the ground as if dredging for a body; Kieren's mouth shuts at the sight.

There's no one home when they get to the Walker house, so Kieren lets himself in, shoulders brushing with Simon as they step inside, fingers brushing as he puts his own bags down and takes the ones that are offered. Simon sits at the kitchen table, watching without moving his head as Kieren sorts and puts away groceries, pacing back and forth to put them in their rightful places, his gaze following Kieren's paces like he needs someone to tell him what direction to go, who to follow. As he crosses the room, a box of biscuits in one hand, Kieren makes sure to stop for a moment and kiss Simon's temple gently, running fingers through his dark hair. He almost misses the way Simon leans into the touch, just barely. When he's finished putting everything away, he turns and leans against the counter, an important thought surfacing, dampening the lightness of his emotions.

"Saw Shirley today, at the store. She asked how you were. She also--" Kieren pushes his fingers against his lips as if to trap the words back inside. Simon ducks his head and raises his brows, that gentle questioning expression, open and wide-eyed, flickering onto his face.

"She also what?"

Kieren chews on his knowledge, trying to swallow down the sour so the darkness he can see in Simon's face doesn't fall another shade. He can't remember the last time he saw Simon smile. Can't remember the last time he hadn't clung to Kieren in the night like he'd disappear, hadn't watched him through his lashes with his chin tucked in like he's terrified Kieren will deliver a punishing blow and bolt. He cannot get all the sour out.

"She said Amy wasn't feeling well before she died. Like she was sick or something. Shirley couldn't help her, said there was nothing in the handbook that said anything about her symptoms."

Simon's fingers tighten on the edges of his chair. "She could have gotten help? Is that why she kept disappearing? Is that why she had blood?"

"I don't know, Simon. I don't know. And we can't ask her now." He can see Simon curling against the back of the chair, shrinking into himself like he can put everything to rights if he only cut himself open and stuffed himself inside the cavern. He shakes his head, steps forward to shake Simon's shoulder gently. "You couldn't have saved her, Simon. It's not your fault."

"But I should have--" Simon mumbles at the countertop, cutting himself off sharply when Kieren's hand presses against the side of his neck.

"There was nothing you could do. You didn't know. And it was Maxine Martin that killed her, Simon, not you. Amy wouldn't want you to blame yourself."

Simon nods, doesn't look convinced. Continues to track his guilt in the wood grain of the table. Kieren sits beside him, taking Simon's hand and tracing the worn fingers, pressing the knuckles against his mouth softly. He wonders if this is what he was like before, with Rick. Wonders if Rick sometimes felt like he needed to wave his arms about and shout to get his attention, like he needed to send out a search party for someone who was right there in front of him. Did he ever stare at Kieren and wonder why he was so lost? He wonders if he needs to wrap Simon up and protect him from the ache before he flees to find his own cold cave. He wonders if it's that bad this time. They sit together in silence until Jem comes home, then Kieren pulls him gently out the back door and leads him home to the bungalow.

 

* * *

 

In his dream, there is a graveyard full of white crosses, and it's empty. The bone saw is bitter cold in his hand but he walks through the barren field with every marker as white as the bones beneath it and there is no one there and he is relieved. His chest feels lighter but the knife is still heavy in his palm, wearing a groove into the edge of his thumb and he can't stand that he knows. He leaves the cemetery behind.

There is a light on inside the bungalow and of course it's Kieren, of course it is, and he grins and kisses Simon hello and all Simon can think is _why are you not running? Why are you not screaming in terror? Why aren't you afraid of me?_ But Kieren cannot see the knife, cannot see the tears running impossibly down pale skin. He takes the hand with the knife and kisses its knuckles and of course, no rational being can fear a thing it will not feel, no one can see the thing it cannot imagine, not when they're already dead, already half-dead, but--

And Kieren kisses him, trusts him despite the betrayal in his tears and Simon cannot look, cannot watch himself do this, but whispers "I'm so sorry" and there is a sharp confused cry and there is black blood dripping down Simon's forearms and he hopes it stains forever. He follows the body down and presses his face to the twice-dead sternum, thinking, _No_. Kieren's eyes stare blankly upward, hurt, asking why? why? why? Please, Simon wants to say to this vivid cast he cannot call a corpse, cannot call anything anymore through his wretched grief, Please, no one kills from hatred. Please, I thought you were going to be worshipped. I didn't know who to believe. Please, oh God, undo this, please.

Kieren's body is burning, charred black. Simon can feel the flames consume his flesh. Wants to fling himself onto the pyre-- take me, take me, burn me up-- but every step he takes Kieren burns a little faster, and by the time he arrives there is nothing but a blackened pile of ash.

He's in the village hall, his footsteps echoing against the deserted wood, and it feels like he's waiting in a queue for something. Too much like church as a child, waiting for the accusing eyes of the all-knowing priest, waiting to take the body and blood that break and congeal in his self-made sin. Amy bursts through the doors, grinning her sunlight smile and he opens his arms wide for her, can't control it, can't run, why aren't you scared of me _I'm_ scared of me?

The bone saw is black with Kieren's blood and Simon wants to plunge it into his own chest, wants to keep them all from losing the second life they deserve, wants to stop destroying the things he loves. Amy is nuzzling her face into his chest and the knife has Kieren's blood on it and Simon watches his hand rise up against his will, wants to scream, wants to shout a warning, wants to push her away. He stares, willing her to somehow fall so that it strikes his own heart but that's not how it works and it's his own hand coming down, his own hand jarring against another solid body, his own hand dropping the knife to the floor in terror. The ground is wet with Amy's red blood and she makes no sound when she falls. Her eyes stare sideways, out the door, away from him.

Another graveyard, only this time they're watching a flower-painted coffin being lowered into the crevasse of second-time's-the-charm grief and no one knows. No one is looking at him, blaming him, seeing what he's done. His hands are black and red and Kieren is standing beside him, his white eyes sightless. The back of his head is congealing, folded back so that Simon is some strange voyeur to the exposed and darkened combs of Kieren's brain, the winding labyrinth of grey matter all torn away and demolished to accusing rubble. He wants to scream "I'm sorry!" but he can't, knows Kieren won't be able to hear him, knows Kieren is less than half-dead here but not like Amy.

And Kieren steps forward blindly, unfolding a drawing to place in the grave. Simon catches sight of Kieren's mother. _No_ , he thinks, _what did she do? Why her? No. Not this again, no._ Sue Walker is innocent. It does not matter. He has no control over his body; he is a puppet, a pawn, a marionette tangled in too many strings. Kieren is staring into the chasm, hands gripping at his elbows. He does not turn around, does not hear or see or notice, he stands frozen in place. Sue Walker weeps as Simon cuts her throat, her fists clenched against her chest. Her face twists in fear and hurt and _why?_ and I don't know, Simon can only reply, I don't know this time, I don't know.

There is a wordless, agonized cry, animal with grief and Simon cannot help but collapse, drop to his knees and drag his fingernails like razors across his face. Kieren can see again, he's clutching his mother's body, one hand sunken uselessly into the hollow of her throat. His drawing of Amy looks like it's bleeding. He turns unblinkingly to Simon and there is nothing in his gaze but pure, stabbing hate.

Simon runs away. Runs to the forest, runs into the dark mass of trees. Falls to the muddy ground and curls into a ball with a keening cry. Somehow he knows he cannot kill himself here, cannot be rid of these stains. He shakes and shakes, convulses until he hopes he can pull himself apart. Needs to breathe, can't breathe, isn't supposed to breathe. He wants to peel all his skin off, layer by layer until he is nothing, until he's nothing but insides but even those are marred, even those have been mauled by needles looking for the Fountain of Youth, scalpels and doctors trying to puzzle out Jacob's Ladder, his own foul chemical dreams. He screams apologies into the night until his throat is raw, until it would be shredded and bleeding if he had any blood.

It doesn't matter. Not even the most forgiving creatures would offer him sympathy for this. The tears freeze on his face, dry up, disappear, his sobs are futile and aching; Simon could cry and suddenly he cannot even if he wants to. He feels like his eyes have been glued open, his mouth has been sewn shut to keep him from screaming. There is blood congealing under his fingernails. His brain is congealing in his skull. It's all his fault, he doesn't want it to be his fault, but it's there and he's the guilty one. He will never deserve forgiveness. There is blood on his hands and the gaping, weeping faces of the ones he loves in his mind. He cannot forget. He cannot die. Kieren's scream sticks in Simon's throat like vomit.

 

The lights are off but Kieren can still see the blue-white outline of Simon's body beside him in bed, black t-shirt striped with yellow-grey from the streetlight through the blinds. The sheets are pushed down to their knees, and he feels like he's watching something he shouldn't be seeing, but he doesn't know how to look away or interrupt. Simon's fists clench, his face contorts itself into agony. He mumbles words that should be familiar but aren't, and Kieren frowns because he cannot understand them and Simon looks terrified even with his eyes closed. He tosses like a fever, like the sheets are a storm he is fighting. He twists his limbs around himself, tangles in the blankets, shakes and shakes and Kieren's hands hover over his body, uncertain. Simon scratches at his own arms, fingernails half-catching on the old black puncture wounds, catching on whimpers that slip out the corner of his mouth. Kieren's fingertips press against Simon's shoulder, a whisper of his name, and he crashes awake, gasping, panting, flailing desperately and clambering to the edge of the bed.

"Simon? Simon, it's okay, you're okay," Kieren reaches out slowly, like he's comforting a wild animal. Simon keens, shrinks back, claws at the mattress like he can dig himself a grave.

"No, don't touch me, please!" He is crying, dry sobs and a shredded voice broken and desperate in the darkened room. "Don't touch me!"

"Simon," Kieren starts slowly, holding his hands out in innocence. "I'm going to turn on the lamp so I can see, okay? It's going to be bright so close your eyes for me, yeah?"

Simon still flinches when Kieren reaches behind himself for the lamp, but he doesn't close his eyes. He's partway off the cliff-face of the bed, sides heaving, and Kieren cannot decipher the way Simon is staring at his face. He looks like he is drowning in gravity, like he's being crushed.

"Simon," White eyes flick towards him, still unfocused. Fists clench and unclench in the sheets greedily, stiff. "Simon, it's okay, you're here in the bungalow with me, in bed. It's safe."

The world has shifted backwards, and Kieren feels like he needs to be the one splaying himself out for a bullet, like he needs to pin Simon to the bed so the gun destroys his nightmares instead. Earthquakes that consumed his shoulders seem to have stopped, though he still watches with an underwater, feral gaze. Kieren shifts his body open, slides one hand along the bed, palm up. It's too much.

Simon lurches backward, tumbling over the side of the bed and onto the ground, scrabbling against the floor to shove himself against the wall, fists up against his temples, pressing, pressing, panting. Kieren stays where he is on the bed, doesn't move from the island that seems miles away from where Simon is taking on water, drowning. Simon's lips are moving, barely a whisper, like he's praying, like he's begging. It takes Kieren a moment to hear it, straining, a litany of "please, please, please, please" muffled by fear and his own clenched teeth.

"It's okay," Kieren tries softly from far away.

A glance, unfocused, head a lead ball. "No, no. Please."

He crawls to the edge of the bed, curls his knees in front of him and wraps his arms around them. He couldn't intimidate if he tried right now. He feels helpless, small. Lost. "I'm not gonna hurt you."

At that, Simon's shoulders hunch, curling, curling until he's nearly collected himself inside his own solar plexus, until his whole body trembles, until a sob convulses his back and his throat cracks around a broken, "Oh _God_."

There is a sea between them, but Kieren can't give up and let him drown, so he presses his chin against his knees and murmurs nonsense, murmurs reassurances and promises, whispers messages of rescue in morse code until Simon is blinking sorrowfully back at him, eyes clearing. Until he reaches out a hand and Simon doesn't shrink back. Then Simon is crawling out of his corner and edging back onto the bed, letting Kieren tentatively touch his hand, his arm, his crumpled face. He curls into a fetal position on top of the sheets and only keens miserably and presses closer when Kieren shifts and wraps his arms tight so that Simon's head his against his chest. They do not sleep, and Kieren's thumb strokes repetitively across the skin behind Simon's ear, even if they cannot feel it. The ragged pleas ring in his mind and he doesn't know what to do with the porcelain pieces that are breaking and crumbling into the blankets and sifting like dust through his hands.

 

* * *

 

There is a moment when the fires die down, and empty shells on every side become shadows. Bullets and bodies, the husks of war hungering for a new kind of justice. The dark clings like a fading disguise and all the vultures are circling, circling.

 

* * *

 

Three weeks after Amy's funeral, Simon finds himself back in the graveyard, searching for the fallen knife. He finds the caged burial mound with a wire tied to it like a clipped kite string, and black bile staining a grey headstone. The knife is an angry feral creature where it lies in the dirt. He picks it up at the base of the blade, pinching it between two fingers like one might hold an angry poisonous snake behind the head. Guilt sits heavy on his chest when he puts it in the pocket of his parka, like when he hid baggies in old socks when he said he was going to quit, like he pretended he didn't need to reassurance that the numb rush was only a lighter and a sharp object away, like he pretended he didn't know his life was a pile of dust just waiting for a breeze.

The knife goes into the dresser drawer, under all his socks, along with the shame of needing it around to remind him. Yet another entry on the long list of Why You Are Not A Good Person. It's written in blood and tears and dangerous chemicals, torn up bibles and promises with crossed fingers behind them.

The sound of the front door closing, the shudder of windows in their frames. "Simon!"

He shuts the dresser drawer and sits down on his bed instead, staring at the taped-up photo like it contains all the frozen pasts he can never change. _I confess to almighty God, and to you..._ _But he can't, not now, it's too much. He'd need an army to count his sins on fingers._ "In here."

"Jem and I finally convinced mum and dad it's time to take the Christmas decorations down." Kieren leans against the doorframe, picking at a bit of peeling paint at shoulder-level. "Do you want to come help? I know it's a bit domestic, the family and all, but I think I'd like it if you... Jem's got a story she'd like to tell you, anyway."

It's not good enough, it will never be good enough. Not for the goodness that is Kieren Walker, not for the way the beast loves the prince. Nothing he can do will absolve him of this. But, something inside him whispers conspiratorially, you can pretend, you can bleach out bits of the stain until you can pretend you don't know it's there because nobody else does. He dusts his hands on his knees like he can flick his sins away and stands up. "All right."

He doesn't expect the hand catching his as he passes through the doorway or the kiss dropped on his lips. At his bewildered expression, Kieren smiles a little, almost sadly. "Thank you. For being so nice to me."

They're going to need to talk about Rick Macy someday, about how that too-long but too-short relationship has set Kieren up to expect refusal at every turn, mocking laughter with every comment, a turned face at every impulse to kiss. Some day, but today he can barely even return the kiss for the guilt simmering in his stomach.

The Walkers greet him warmly, and he and Kieren set to taking down the tinsel and bunting hung round the house. Simon's disengaging the tinsel and bunting from the walls, draping the strands across Kieren until his arms and shoulders are tangled in silvery bits. Jem perches on the back of the couch and makes crass jokes and snarky comments and tells Simon the story of her seeing Gary harassing a PDS woman with a mangled leg who could not move swiftly enough on her crutches to deter him, and how she punched him cheerfully in the face before turning round and helping the woman away.

"You should've seen his face, though. It were like someone had pissed in his beer and told him he needed to sing karaoke to get a new one. I thought I was gonna bust meself laughing." Simon gives her a genuine smile, an expression that has always felt strange on his face when sober.

"We'll make an activist out of you, yet. Jem Walker, from HVF hero to scrappy PDS supporter. You're on your way." He jokes, falling back onto charming, finding himself liking Jem's blunt force, the sarcasm and snark that's twinned with Kieren's. She punches him in the shoulder with a friendly grin, and he rocks back on his heels with the force of it despite being unable to feel anything more than a slight pressure.

It's the little moments like this that remind him how much he wishes he could feel again. Those little sensations you don't even realize you miss until there's nothing left of them but the condensation of a memory. When he turns back to the tinsel after watching Jem walk back into the kitchen, he finds Kieren staring at him. "What?"

Kieren seems to shake himself present, mouth twitching wryly. "Am I not allowed to get you back for all the staring at me you do?" Then, "You're getting realer, I think. She likes _you_ , not the you from before."

"Hmph." Simon's not ready to examine the expression that he caught on Kieren's face, not ready to entertain the notion that the muffled desires of his rotten heart might possibly becoming true, manifesting themselves at the exact moment he deserves it least.

Dinner at the Walkers' has now become far less awkward. Simon and Kieren sit on the side of the table devoid of dishes or food, while the rest of the family eats. Kieren had quietly talked to his mum about it, and they're getting used to admitting that there are things Kieren can no longer do in this state.

Simon watches Kieren and Jem poke fun at each other across the table, exchanging playful banter at the expense of each other and their parents. He tries to imagine the past, to conjure up an idea of this table five years ago or more, a family not burdened by death or undead. He tries to imagine what Kieren's life might have been like before his death, but considering the manner of it, he's sure the picture he's painted in his own head is horribly wrong. He has no idea how long Kieren heard the world clamoring, "kill yourself, kill yourself, do it for our sake, for your sake, for his sake" before he took its advice.

Kieren seems happier now, despite the grief of Amy's death. A door has been opened, a light turned on; he can see it glistening in his eyes. He catches Simon watching him and smiles, curling their fingers together under the table.

Like a broken soldier too used to harsh conditions of battle and heartbreak, Simon takes stock of all the reasons he has to be here. His rations build scaffolding across his broken ribs, press them upright so he can breathe again. One: the way Kieren smiles at him sideways, a secret corner-of-the-eye grin, something gentle and bright. Two: the words of Amy's will, her generosity, how the ghost of her smile is still caught in her home. Three: the way Sue and Steve Walker had hugged him like a son, the way Jem no longer looks at him with caution. Four: the thought that maybe this time things will go right.

As Simon shrugs on his parka at the end of the night, Kieren promises to join him at the bungalow later on, and Simon walks home alone, staring up at the stars and thinking. A part of him doesn't want Kieren to come over. He doesn't deserve Kieren, after the things he's done. He doesn't deserve anything after all the hurt he's caused. The deaths. Sometimes he wishes he could remember what happened when he came home, just so he knew what it was he felt so guilty for. Just so he could know if he was feeling _enough_ guilt. So he could know if he should have offered more of his body to John and Victor, as punishment for then and for now. So he could know which how many pieces to tear off and offer to the claw-handed god that might be out there.

The Undead Prophet had been wrong. There was no lamb, and those thousands were not virgins. He is no salvation, he is a hammer, crushing everything around him. The words that had echoed red and fiery into his veins as he was strapped down were wrong, they were not a incense or a balm or anything but a lie.

Under the dark sky, he comes to a full stop in the middle of the road. He'd lived his life in lies before this; he should be able to recognize them in others. He should have seen. He'd had very little contact with the Undead Prophet himself. A turned back and a Halloween skull mask was all he could remember. And dirty hands. Tanned, soft dirty hands with veins running thickly across the backs of them. The voice had come from the speaker system to tell him the living were liars. He had been the first to respond positively to the drug, the first to know that there was even a chance of getting out. But they had all heard. That message was not just for him. Norfolk had only started releasing patients a week or two before. Not enough time to infiltrate, to build a safehouse, to learn the script and find the grungy operating theatre and plan the shutdown.

Dirty tanned hands with soft palms, and freedom, and knowledge, and time. The still point of the turning world, and no one thought to point a finger, dig their nails in to find something neither flesh nor fleshless. There's no thought of questioning whether the light in the darkness is a hearth fire or the headlights of an oncoming car. Simon runs his hands across his face and wants to scream. There's no point in questioning a man of smoke and mirrors and masks. The devil lies to the curious and the lost, and so creates the fallen. He should have known.

 

When the ULA takes him in, Simon hears hundreds of stories of people's deaths and risings, their fear and grief, their gratefulness at being alive again. Redeemed travellers come and go, stay for a night or two before moving on. Always telling their stories, and Simon is there to listen. A feeling of familiarity seems to lurk in a corner of Simon's brain. Some stories, some people, some names, a small recognizable spark in the darkness. But Simon can never bring himself to ask.

Simon had very few friends when he was alive in the first place; he ignores the feeling of familiarity and lets it simmer. When you've heard enough stories, dead or alive, read too many books to escape the world you exist in, talked to enough hallucinations while you're sagged on a grimy bathroom floor, everything starts to feel a little too familiar. He's lived his life in his head, in pages, feeding off the spectres of books, hiding in the stories of other people for so long, everything blurs together to make one long well-known tale of exhausting hurt, no room for his own.

Sometime after Simon arrives, the Prophet speaks to them, the Twelve. He stands in the corner of the room with his back to them, a black figure that looks like a mountain in their awe-filled eyes. There is a mask over his face, and his voice has been twisted round backward and Simon feels like he's talking to God. The Prophet told them he had saved them, that they were home now, that they were his children. The Prophet does not look at the cluster of spellbound, aching hearts that sit in chairs behind him. Simon stares hard, wants a glimpse. The figure of glory speaks, clenches his hands, hunches his shoulders, leaves after they've filed out of the room with hymns on their tongues.

Between themselves, the disciples discuss how they found the Undead Prophet, or how he found them. Many were kicked out by fearful families and found a refuge here, some had left willingly, unable to tolerate abuse and persecution in their towns. Some simply wished to start over. A girl points to her missing left eye and says that her PTSD-ridden girlfriend had done it to her in the night, when she had shaken her out of a nightmare bare-faced. They had decided it would be better for both of them if she left, and with a goodbye kiss she could neither feel nor taste, she walked out to find someplace new. All of their stories are bruised and broken and frightened.

When the circle of Redeemed looks to Simon, he finds that he cannot speak. How can he put the horrors he's been through into words? How can he tell them that in life he was less than nothing, a worthless, crawling junkie they would have walked past or even spit on. How can he tell them that he'd ripped up his insides with chemicals, trying to kill his brain because he wanted so much to disappear.

How can he tell them that there are burn marks under his hair and a hellish gash in his back and it's all because he said yes, fix me, fix me please, and believed the doctors would help him. How can he explain the pain and terror and helplessness of hearing your own body being cut open while doctors discuss your insides like you don't even exist. He loves the other disciples, but he does not trust them. He's never met anyone that didn't take the soft pieces of him that he bared in trust and tear them to shreds at a moment's convenience. He closes his eyes, swallows, and makes no sound.

 

* * *

 

Kieren has been finding that living in two places means constantly forgetting things, leaving important bits of his life scattered around Roarton in an unintentional scavenger hunt for the pieces of his day to day existence. He's been struck with artistic inspiration this morning, but despite the careful transfer of an easel to the bungalow, all his paints are still back at the Walker house. It's the middle of the day, so he uses his key to get inside and starts to hurry up the stairs to his room.

"Kier?" Jem's voice filters out from her half-open door, stopping him in his paint-mission. He presses it further open and leans against the door frame.

"Yeah?"

"Can you come here a sec?"

"Yeah, sure, what is it?" Kieren peers at her serious face, concerned. Jem shifts nervously on her bed as he moves to sit in front of her, chewing solemnly on the side of a thumbnail.

"It's the new year and all," Jem had made a resolution to be more open to her family, but especially to Kieren, though she'd told him that part in private later. "An' I'm having my first therapy session of this year in a couple of days, y'know."

"Yeah, I saw on the calendar."

Jem nods at him, shifts, twists her fingers in her bedspread. Kieren watches her swallow heavily, a breathe a slow in, out, shaky with nerves. She opens her mouth, nothing, tries again.

"I wanted to tell you-- this was back before, when no one else knew. After-- After Henry." Tears are welling up in Jem's eyes, but she seems not to notice them, or at least makes no move to check them. Kieren reaches out to take her hand, but she clenches them into fists and jerks away, trembling. She gestures towards the bottom drawer of her nightstand, fingers fluttering like nervous wings. "I thought about it. Couple of times. After Henry. I just-- I couldn't take it, the fear, the guilt, feeling like all the people who were dead because of me were coming for me, coming to tell me I could have saved them, coming to tell me I was a monster. It all hurt so much. I just wanted it to stop, Kier. I just wanted it to go away. I couldn't do it, but I thought-- I thought..."

She glances out the window, up at the ceiling, tries to hold his gaze and drops to his chest. Kieren feels something inside him lurch, remembers that morning months ago when she'd refused breakfast, refused to smile, hitched a breath in, out. Remembers how she'd said "I love you," a general _you_ , in a voice that felt like an unspecific, possible goodbye, like the goodbye Kieren remembers calling out before he left that last time too.

"Oh, Jem," He pulls her into his arms and her tears spill over."I'm so sorry."

He can imagine how she felt, can twist his own memories to fit her circumstances. He knows the grasping need for relief, the terrifying, paralyzing hurt, the thought like a pounding headache that there might only be one way out. Like him, she'd said nothing. Like him, she'd trapped herself in the knots of silence, bad decisions, suffocating anxieties.

It was like some constant black monster chasing you and you're out of breath and stumbling and blind and wondering whether it might be better to just stop running and let it consume you to stop your lungs from burning and your skull from throbbing. Kieren had stopped running, had let it catch him, but Jem is still here, still running. He hugs her tighter and she clutches at the back of his shirt.

"I'm sorry."

"You've nothing to be sorry for, Jem. You know I understand." He rubs at the back of her neck. "Have you told your therapist yet?"

Jem pulls away from him, wiping her eyes with her palms and shaking her head. "I thought you should know first, before anyone else. It felt-- important."

Important that he know, that he hear it before anyone else because he's the one in the family who went through with it, who let his pain destroy him. Important because he is the one who knows how close you can get, how far you can go.

"I'm glad you told me, you know. I know it can get to be too much and you start to feel like you're falling but you're allowed to let people hold you up. So tell me if it gets like that again, because you know I won't judge you. Can't, really." He looks into her tear-streaked face, broken pieces held together with hot glue and string. This whole family, every heart cobbled back into one piece in the most flimsy of ways. "I'm sorry you have to be like this, too. God, one of us should be enough, don't you think? I won't let you fall, Jem."

She hugs him again, burying her face in his shoulder, and Kieren can't help but think of her here in this room, staring down at her own gun, lungs and heart flailing to function as they're drowning in black, Kieren in the next room over. Kieren, who drowned in his own darkness, who could have helped to pull her out. But here she is, pulling herself out, finding handholds and footholds in the people around her, carving them out all by herself.

He remembers his mother's quiet confession in the candlelit darkness of the cave, the distance in her gaze as she remembers those feelings; the same distance he knows is in his own, is in Jem's. Maybe the Walkers are faulty by design, maybe they've all been born with an off switch that's too sensitive, born with one foot dangled over a bridge, but here is Jem Walker, his little sister, staring it all in the face and refusing to leave, refusing to break.

 


	3. Keep The Dog Far Hence

He thought he wasn't going to come back home. He thought he'd die alone in some dingy hotel room or alleyway or garage, and he did. In the treatment centre, Simon thought he'd die a strange, surreal death full of numb sentience and the sounds of his body being ruined. He didn't. He thought he wasn't going to come back home. He did, and it ripped everything apart.

 _You don't deserve to look at her_. He knows it. He'd known it the first time they'd ever kicked him out, and he'd come back a month later still fucked up and she'd kissed his forehead and hugged him and told him they'd get him help, they'd get him better. He didn't get better, only spiralled further down until he was drowning under his own sullen ocean, no breath, no air. He'd known it the moment he'd picked up the photograph in his room, unsure whether to smile or uselessly attempt to weep. He didn't deserve to look at her. He doesn't deserve to think of her. He deserves nothing but the streets he's been left on, the cold he can't feel past the numb emptiness rattling in his body but not his brain. He deserves this directionless unlife of walking, useless, thoughtless, lost.

Everything is grey. Nothing moves as he plods endlessly down the road, as if the world has died and come back brain dead and sluggish. Gutters are littered with broken bits of weapons, road-side grave sites. He doesn't look up at the glaring, scraping eyes of broken windows and kicked-in, clawed-out doors of the buildings surrounding him. Simon wonders if this is what it's like to walk the shores of Acheron all the way down.

The world is a patient etherized on a table, waiting some foreign hand with a scalpel or syringe to open it up and peer inside. He can no longer chase the current of his bloodstream, riding out the overwhelming wail and ache of the world with a needle as his Charon. He is abandoned, just another building barely standing in the broken jaw of the city, crumbling with damage and decrepit with disuse. A sign is posted in the scaffolding of his ribcage: all materials of value have been removed.

Simon used to worry that, after he died, his senses would continue to work. Every exploration of the mortician’s hand would be a horrifying sensation to his dead brain, too much, an overdose of touch. The smell of formaldehyde would remind him dizzyingly of back-lot alleys and the flutter of his own eyelids as the fix hit.

He'd heard once they sometimes sew the mouths of the dead shut to keep them from screaming on the table.

The mortician would mutter to himself, hands slicing and dicing at the edge of Simon's vision, "Look at these lungs, look at all the useless, pointless things this one has said to try and placate the people who loved him. And this stomach, too small, no wonder he couldn't handle living. There's rings on his liver like a tree, one for every time he lied about not being on anything, promise. And this heart, so tiny and cold, is there any point to it, I wonder?" A modern Anubis, he would weigh each finger, record the hurt in every print. Say, "You've tried to claw your father's words from your skin, but they're trapped under your fingernails." Say, "He didn't believe in this world so he tried to make a new one in his wrists." Say, "If you lived your life a ghost, what happens when you die?" Say, "I don't think I've ever seen anyone more alone."

He was never sure whether embalming would be worse, or cremation. And now he knows. He used to think, as the rush of numbness hit him, that he shot morphine into his veins so he wouldn't be aware of the exploring hands after he died. He'd never have to learn all the flaws and pains he never wanted to think about, never had to hear the mutterings telling every aching truth. Now he can't avoid it. Now every time he closes his eyes he hears the squelch and creak as they opened him up, stirred up his insides, rearranged his bones and closed him up around the feeling of _wrong_ , so _wrong_.

Now he knows how it feels to be physically numb down to his bones, but to still somehow feel the buzz and tension of electricity coursing through his muscles, to still somehow feel the strange chemicals they pushed into his veins crawling up his arm and stopping suddenly, clogging solid at the high point of his arm, arteries no longer pulsing strange substances through his corrupted bloodstream.

So they'd sewed his frog-parts up crooked, with a slit rent up the back of him for the Undead Prophet to slide his bloody hand inside and spout dictated words in the name of salvation. In his pocket, the note burns: we must not look at goblin men. In his pocket, the pieces of his former life scald: who knows upon what soil they fed? But he is so hungry for anything like love, and so alone, and it all looks a little something like the bare bones of a home. He's embraced by the Liberation Army, the great hand reaching out to pluck the flies from the windowsill and breath them back into wobbling, infant flight.

Those that liveth, and were dead; except did he ever really live, when he spent every second of his sentient existence covering his ears against the screaming black of the world, or deafening it all chasing the blissfully drifting black through his veins? And we have the keys to hell and death in our hands. Except we don't, do we? He had them, once, in his own broken spine, chained to his ribs and stabbing into his lungs, into his heart, so he saw nothing else _but_ that. So he hid from it in syringes and Greco-Latin polysyllabic names he never cared to know so long as it pulled the shade down over his too-bright too-loud too-much-pain mind.

They've torn him open, torn it out of him, torn away half of all his dwindling wholes until there's nothing left but white fear and a clutching need for something to hold him up past his broken back. The ULA hands him a shepherd's staff.

 

* * *

 

The dissolution of the HVF stops nothing. Kieren wears as little makeup as possible at the Legion, half smiles when he sees his bare white eyes in the reflection of the glasses he's cleaning. Dean and Pearl are the only ones who will look him in the face.

Dean sits with Gary at the bar but salutes Kieren when their eyes meet. Kieren is pretty sure he just feels sorry for the sad sack Gary has become, a fixture of miserable, boredom-induced confrontation in his designated spot at the pub. Pearl rolls her eyes most of the time, scolds him when he gets too loud, her version of an apology to Kieren for nearly shooting him in the graveyard. Dean tips him extra when Gary is exceptionally nasty.

There is still hate in Gary's eyes, still prejudiced malice and disgust spewing from his mouth and flaring nostrils like vomit, angry fire that builds in violence and volume until someone throws him out or shuts him up. It means there are nights Kieren excuses himself to the back, to the garbage bins outside, anywhere so he can lean his forehead against a wall and pretend he isn't shaking, pretend he isn't flashing back to that night when Maggie Burton pleaded for her undead life on her knees in the street, to the black blood smeared across his hands, to the shot that rang in his ears-- the shot that rang in his ears-- the shot that could have rung.

Kieren usually comes to work wishing he'd built up his ability to ignore insults when he was younger as well as he'd built up the image that he'd had that ability. He pours drinks or clears away glasses or cleans tables and wishes his dishcloth was a weapon, wishes his silence was sharp enough to tear everyone to shreds. It helps, sometimes, to think of Simon with his arms locked round Gary's head, to think of Jem's head held high and proud when she passes a sullen Gary in the street. It helps to remember that there are no peers for anyone in the jury of the townsfolk, that everything is subject to gossip and ridicule, and his problems are old news to all except one.

Gary is in top form today, lingering like old cigarette smoke in the corner. It was busy enough at first that Kieren was able to ignore it, preoccupied with taking orders and retrieving things. Now there are only stragglers left, and Kieren has nothing to do but wipe down unused glasses, and Gary's hate cuts into his turned back like a knife.

"And I still can't believe you've hired on that rotten bastard again, Pearl." Pearl is very pointedly not listening, not looking at him, smiling stiffly at the woman she's having a conversation with about some gossip mag or another. Kieren starts to feel like his skin's going to slough off. "Thought I dealt with enough brainless pricks round here, all you lot supporting these mostly dead whatchacallits."

Someone nearby laughs a little. Gary takes this as encouragement, lips twisted in a drunken grin, wolf's mouth dripping saliva from its yellowing fangs.

"They oughta be six feet under where they belong, not climbing the fuckin' ladder. It ain't right. It's unnatural." Pearl catches Kieren's eye and jerks her head at him, silent command to go out and clean tables. Kieren's feet are full of cement. The dishcloth is made of steel wool that cuts his hands. His ears are numb and ringing. Gary clocks him as he rounds the bar and starts cleaning tables as far from the drunken man as possible.

"And how could we forget our very own poster boy for the unnatural freak show? Dry Rot's not only already bent up enough to top himself, he's also just plain bent." Kieren ignores him, turns his back and pretends it doesn't feel like his spine's exposed, like everyone in the bar can see the open scars across his wrists even through his long sleeved shirt. Pretends he doesn't feel like a broken, bleeding animal being watched by a hungry predator with glistening jaws.

The man in the corner chuckles again, a drunken snort Kieren's not even sure is directed at Gary, who takes it as encouragement anyway.

"A poof and a ghoul."

Kieren wipes down the table more vigorously than usual. He rolls his eyes, tries to push it all away, muttering under his breath. "Jesus Christ."

"Didn't know rotters could take one up the arse. Leave it to this crooked one, here, eh? S' a bit funny though, ain't it?" Gary raises his voice despite the fact that Kieren's path round the tables has taken him closer until he's a table away. Anger simmers in Kieren's gut; his hands shake and twitch. Gary watches him with the eyes of a hunter. "A dead'un and a queer'un."

"You're right funny, Gary. You'd think you ought to pick something less obvious than the fact that I'm gay or PDS."

Gary's eyes electrify and he sneers, face an ugly smear of loathing. "Yer sister's a cunt."

Kieren doesn't even realized he's lunged at Gary until he's punched him square in the face, one hand fisted in his collar and shoving him against the smoke-stained wall. Gary growls at him, struggling. It takes only a moment before he gives up and stands limply, hands clutched around Kieren's wrist. It's easy to forget that having no sensation also means he can use all of his strength at once without realizing it. Dark red blood drips from Gary's nose and lands on Kieren's pale thumb.

"That is where I draw the line," Pearl has appeared to pull them apart, her face a bright pink grimace. "Gary, get out. You won't be insulting no young ladies like that in my pub."

Gary slinks out the door, tossing a wad of crumpled, greasy bills onto the table. Kieren finishes the rest of his shift with everyone's eyes on his back. He cannot say a word. As soon as Pearl lets him go, he hobbles quickly down the street, curling in on himself. By the time he reaches the familiar grave, he wonders if maybe he could just shrink down, hide in his shoe, hide in some unsuspecting cell of his body that isn't twisted and broken and battered, hide in the dark here in the dirt.

He taps his fingers against the marble like he's dialing a number, like he's trying to get someone's attention. "Hey Amy."

There is no answer. He leans forward and knocks his head against the stone, resting his hands against the face of rock beside his temples, forehead pressed against her name. It's cold, it must be. He can't feel it. Mud is starting to stain his knees, the cuffs of his red jeans, but it's just another darkish mark across his clothes to add to the gunpowder and black bile and red, red blood. There is no breath of air big enough to rid his lungs of the ghosts that hide inside him. He cannot breathe. He cannot feel all the spirits of anger and grief that climb his ribs like a ladder. One hand digs into the dirt at his side.

"I'm tired of playing at war, Amy. I'm tired everyone has weapons except for us. Simon walks around outside like he can't be touched, but sometimes I see him in the other room, and it's like he's been cut open and he's just watching his insides fall out and not doing anything about it. I don't know, Amy. It feels like we're on the graveyard shift all the time, like it's dark outside and we've got all these lights on too bright and they're distorting everything because it's too quiet and the music is turned up too loud to drown it all out. Like reality's been put in a blender." All of this, it's like he's burning up inside his head but everything on the outside is frozen, preserved corpses and mummified emotions trapped in breathless lungs and dried up eyes. He grinds his knuckles against the stone until he remembers that skin doesn't grow back anymore, that nothing grows back anymore. "Everyone's too scared to admit they're still scared, just for different reasons. I can look at myself in the mirror now, Amy, and it's great, but he can barely even look at his own hands. I think he's scared to close his eyes. He won't talk to me. I don't know how to help. Amy, I wish you were still here so you could talk to me, so he wouldn't feel like he's the reason you're gone, so you and Jem could be best friends like I know you would. How do I move forward when everyone's keeping the lights on way too bright to keep their fears away and I can't see what's out there in the dark?"

There is no answer, of course, he knows there won't be. Amy is not here, and the wind is too preoccupied with the trees to form its whisper into some kind of reply. Might as well be talking to some empty skeleton on the other side of the field; that's how much sense it makes to talk to the dead. He can't be satisfied with the thought of daisies coming up from bones, bits of a stolen life in their petals. He leaves a streak of dirt across the headstone when he stands. It doesn't matter. There isn't a single part of this town that isn't stained with hurt.

 

* * *

 

Somewhere there is a dead land, where shadows twist and scatter like cracks or vines or pain, the movement and stillness where the dance is, two great magnetic poles groping, grasping, famishing for flesh. Concussion dots dance black at the corners, sinkholes drop wide. Different darknesses with the same lost shades flicker round the point of _between_.

Two shadows rise up and swallow the scattering penumbrae. Gaping mouths claim answers, claim victims, claim follow, follow, follow. Spines shatter in the dark.

 

* * *

 

Suppose it's all going to mean something in the end, this stepping in front of guns and tearing open chests, and dancing round the heart of the matter all the while? Suppose existence isn't just everyone groping about in the dark with hooks for hands, slashing themselves and each other to pieces before they can find someplace to rest.

Only, Simon knew the answer when he was eleven and he still knows the answer now at thirty-two. Existence is meaningless, there are claws at the end of every arm and the darkness is just murky enough to make out silhouettes and hope there's a connection. Existence is run on scraping by in the dark, on hope and maybe a spark and mostly in pretending that fear isn't going to consume you when you realize you're not sure whether you're looking at humans, or ghosts.

So they're watching a mindless, utterly uncaptivating movie, avoiding the nightmares that always seem to come with sleep, and Simon is thinking about how he was always afraid of a different kind of dark, when Kieren's fingers in his begin to shake. A low-level vibration that neither of them notice at first, but then his whole hand is shaking, trembling uncontrollably.

"Kieren?"

They untangle their fingers and Kieren shakes out his hand, bending the fingers back and forth. Still, the trembling continues. "It's nothing. Really."

Simon feels a bolt of fear through his chest. "How long?"

"Since Amy's funeral. It's probably nothing. Maybe I need to up my dose."

Simon wants to ignore it. God, he wants to pretend it's not happening, to turn a blind eye to the things he knows and try to be happy. He wants to just sit on the couch with Kieren and watch movies and watch him draw and go on walks and read books quietly. He wants to forget everything and pretend it's all okay. But there is a mask on hill somewhere out there, and Kieren's hand is still shaking where it rests on his knee, and Shirley said Amy was sick, and Simon remembers watching the tiny shivers in her fingertips out of the corner of his eye, and he can't bear for his nightmares to come true, to lose Kieren to the earth too.

"It happened to Amy," he whispers, staring at his knees like he can pretend he hadn't said anything. Like he can pretend they might not be dying all over again.

"What?"

"Before she died, Amy shook like that. Thought I didn't notice. I think she didn't want to worry me." Simon feels fear pitting his stomach. "We can't go to Russo. He'll call Norfolk."

"The ULA? You said they have answers."

Simon shakes his head, pushing himself out of his seat to pace across the living room rug. There is a feeling of terror he cannot translate into words. Ropes wind their way through his ribs and tighten, cracking the brittle bones and squeezing until everything inside him is liquid black. The world seems flashing danger around him and his mind blanks at the glare.

Wild animals kill their children when they show signs of weakness. Things with teeth rip out the bellies of their young when they are starving to death. He taps his fingers against his thighs. "I'm a devil to them now, they wouldn't receive me. To them I've already had my insides spilled. I'm marked, and besides, they wouldn't be much help anyway. If you want preaching or Blue Oblivion, sure, by all means, go to them. Something like this, though, they're as clueless as we are."

"Doctor Russo is alright, we could still go to him."

"No!" Simon spins around, white eyes wild. The folds of his back did not give him wings; the dark slash is a cavern to fall into. He cannot risk Kieren being nailed to the cross by the gashes in his own wrists, all in the name of solving the riddle and cheating Charon of his rightful price. "No, you can't. If you do, he'll call Norfolk and they'll send you back. I'm not going to let you go back there. Not when I know what they're capable of. Not when I know they'll happily peel you back and label your bones with numbers like you don't even use them."

"So we just wait and see what happens? Simon, that's--"

"It's the best we can do right now. Until we find something better. Or until we walk through to the other side."

Simon sits back down on the couch, slotting his fingers against Kieren's again, suddenly craving more than ever the warmth and pressure he remembers from holding someone's hand. They can only comfort with words now, significant looks, actions. So little sensation means everything is a sense memory, done out of habit or human nature, but with little satisfaction. So often Simon feels like he's trapped in a tight leather suit, sensation dulled by the thick skin that isn't his, by the dead thing that covers him. So often he wonders, could he feel if he only tore off this flesh to the nerves underneath?

"I just want to live me life in peace, for once." Kieren laments, pounding his knee with a fist. "Every time I finally start to get comfortable, to get used to it, something else comes up to mess it all up again."

"Kieren. Kieren, stop, please, you're shaking again."

"Shit," Kieren squeezes his hand into a fist, stretches the fingers to their fullest length and shakes them out until the trembling stops.

Simon thinks he could be shaking, too. Fear. The shiver that eats at you. Simon can pretend the walls are enough. Simon is standing in the dark with a pick in his hand, striking at heads, lashing out at mouths that drip wide with spittle. Simon is thinking of his dream. _I watched you burn, Kieren, and I felt it._

When they curl up together in bed, Simon wraps his arms around the thin body beside him and curls his fingers around Kieren's. If he holds on tight enough, turns his face away into the back of Kieren's neck, it won't reach him. There will be no fatal secrets revealed, no unknown sickness spread, no flaying knife of rejection levelled at him, no loss. They can stay like this forever with Kieren breathing useless automatic breaths beside him and the sound of nothing but wind outside.

 

* * *

 

The bathroom in the Walker house is a shell of privacy and quiet, and Kieren sits on the edge of the bathtub in the watery grey light and watches his hands tremble. He's been shaking more and more lately, the vibrations near constant and he doesn't know what to think.

It makes him nervous, the idea of changing again. He's only just getting used to this existence that despite being physically numb has granted him more feeling and more life and, strangely, more _freedom_ than his other eighteen years ever did. He can look at himself in the mirror for the first time since he was twelve. He can look at his own wrists and feel some regret but mostly relief-- that even after the loss of Amy, he doesn't feel like he needs this anymore. Somehow, this body is more comfortable to him than he ever was in a body with full sensation and function for eighteen years.

Before he died, he felt wrong in his own skin, wrong in his own head, wrong all over. Walls on every side trapped him inside himself, feeling too much, all too much, until everything overwhelmed him and he went muffled and grey. All he wanted was to be a new kind of numb, the kind where things don't hurt you anymore, where you live inside a bubble of tingling nothing instead of pain so intense you can't even feel it any longer. He wanted nothing more than to be able to take arrows without thought, to walk through fire and lie on needles and let voices slice up his skin without bleeding or burning or tears. He couldn't take it.

(It's always been hard to exist as a human; knowing you're just soft squishy thing being controlled by a larger, less squishy thing, and every firing of every synapse is arbitrary. Some deity's little fleshy computers controlled by randomized, bug-filled programming.)

He remembers clearly when Henry Lonsdale died, the dozens of surgeries that left scars littering his tiny chest not enough for a body that weakened every heart it was given. Not enough for a body whose blood fought itself, who turned itself black and blue on the inside until he was coughing up bits of his own throat and his heart was beating like an overworked hummingbird, until it screamed at him and the doctors couldn't fix him with wires in time, pieces of his lungs and blood from his hearts lying in his cold, waxen lap.

Trapped in a body that tore itself to pieces. A brain that couldn't find its way through the fog. Numbness that was too numb, that wasn't numb enough. Two dead hearts and two dead brains and nothing living left to blame. Diseases are nasty. Then again, so is heartbreak. When Kieren came back, he felt trapped, in his head, in this insensible body that felt ( _didn't feel at all, can't feel my own skin_ ) awkward to walk in, awkward to live in.

There were times, before he died, minutes or hours or even days when he'd slip into a strange, dissociative state. He'd watch himself float from home to class and back again, watch himself eat dinner with his family and pretend he wasn't somewhere else, empty. He was a box of nerves with the wire all wrapped up; the things he touched seemed to exist behind some sort of invisible barrier. He'd be floating up to Rick after school, looking down at his body, at the faded over-bright contrast of the world around him, asking, "Is this real? Am I real? Am I watching a bad film of everyone else's lives?"

Sometimes, in the cave, or quietly over the phone, he'd ask Rick "Are you sure you exist?" Rick would always say, Yes, I'm sure. Yes. "Are you though?" Why shouldn't I be? "We're all slowly dying, every cell losing the ability to replicate itself the more it replicates itself. We're breaking down bit by bit, fading away into nothing. Are you sure you exist?" Yes, of course. "How?" I don't know, I just am. Kieren stopped asking, after a while.

Then he died, and those moments were even stranger. Somehow, he was existing between the reality and the idea, between the emotion and the response. He'd turned hollow, utterly unable to sense anymore whether this was supposed to be. Being cut off from his own body only made the mental numbness worse, like the few ugly sparks of sensation that sometimes pulsed feebly through his body were just a valley of dying stars, a trick to make him wonder whether all of this wasn't just a dream he was trapped in. He'd panic and breathe in, in, in for air he'll never need again, panic more when he felt nothing, when he was nothing. He was existing between every nerve, floating on a dead synapse, waving his arms for a futile rescue from a reanimated, but not resensitized, empty desert body.

Sometimes he wonders if maybe he'll be able to feel again, if maybe these shakes, these snatches of strange half-numb tingles mean he'll wake up warm one morning, wake up able to feel the clothes on his body and the prickling, velvety warmth of the sun. He might cry if that happens, or run away and hide, trying to shake the confusion out of his bones and find his equilibrium again.

Because what if this only means that the centre cannot hold? What if this only means that the still, unchanging state of PDS has some sort of terrifying antithesis, a backward form of decay where they tremble and shake and move again before falling apart? What if it means some drowsy part of his undead body is waking up, only to plunge a knife into his heart or the back of his head?

And yet, it's exciting, his rebel body possibly reigniting flesh and bone. He misses the feeling of his fingerprints, his identity pressed into his hands. He misses hands in his hair, on his shoulders, rubbing. He misses scalding himself on water too hot to touch. Instead, he scalds himself on Simon, on Amy, on his faith in Rick the second ( _third? fourth?_ ) time round. He wants to remember how pain felt, proper pain like a fall or a scratch. He wants to run the bristles of a paintbrush across his cheek, the backs of his hands. He wants someone to play with his hair. He wants to feel a kiss-- really, properly _feel_ it. He could paint thousands of pictures as an elegy to touch, to the things he remembers, to the things he misses, wishes, craves.

And what will Simon think? When he tells him there are tremors living under his skin, when he tells how he seems to shiver and shake from the newness of it all, from the pain of it all, the fear, the love, all, all. What will Simon think of change he so seemed to reject before? There's no affirmation for turning back, there's no affirmation for changing into something new, something you're not sure you want to be. Simon's scriptures don't hold much comfort; anything can be corrupted, anything can slip into a faultline, change with a shake. Those gentle white eyes have been looking more hurt of late; Simon has been quiet, fists clenched at his sides, gaze miles long.

What happens next, now that Amy is gone? Now that Kieren is quaking, peaking, shifting? Now that Simon seems always to look down instead of ahead? And what judgments will he make upon the presentation of this revelation: something will change? Because now Simon is the one on his toes, ready to fight or flee or fling himself down on the chopping block. And Kieren's not ready for him to make any of those choices at all.

 

* * *

 

It was silly of him to think he might've been feeling good again. Silly of him to think that coming back made him better, that the ULA made him better, that anything at all could have made him _better_. They only changed all the hurt into a different kind of hate, only used it to manipulate him once they saved him. He wasn't feeling better; he was just distracting himself with extremism and proselytizing the way he used to distract himself with the thought that maybe his pain would change the world, or the way he used to distract himself with the slow press of a syringe or the bitter, gagging chalk of a pill dissolving on the back of his tongue. It's not that he hadn't ever wanted to die after he came back; it's just that he's already dead.

He'd tried again, one night after his father kicked him out. Stole a purse from a bar, rifled through it in a smoggy alleyway, tossed the carcass in a dumpster. Bought enough heroin to kill himself three times over, didn't feel a thing when he shot up in the track mark-riddled crook of his right arm; instead he nearly blacked out from the memory of a different kind of needles prodding him, too much, too soon.

Nothing happened, no numbness, no amnesiac bliss. His veins remained sludge; his brain remained an aching clenched fist. It's silly of him now to think that hurt had all gone away with the coming of a masked saviour made from the flimsy pages of a Bible, or the arrival of a dark-eyed, light-haired boy made from pain and passion and so much bravery.

He can't stop it, the hurt. Doesn't understand how no one else seems to see how much it was _him_ that caused this, _his_ actions that made it all happen. Whispers to some long-dead undying God are useless but he utters them anyway, does them like repetition will somehow make it true, like it means something to more than just his childhood self praying at the foot of the bed every night. _I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words and in what I have done and what I have failed to do._ He brought Amy back to Roarton, he gathered the little ULA faction there, he told the Undead Prophet he'd found the First Risen, he'd become so entwined in Kieren that he couldn't get away. He'd gotten Amy killed. He'd nearly killed Kieren himself.

The thought of a knife in Kieren's head or neck or heart fills him with a heavy black tar that pins him to the ground and chokes sobs from his throat. The guilt seems to corrode his very substance, marrow and flesh, burning everything away until he's nothing but a shriveled, aching, unbeating heart too dilapidated and used up to function.

He shouldn't be surprised when the old thoughts crawl out of their box somewhere in his mind. He should be used to this by now: the way his vision clouds over dim and dark, how he can't listen to other people's words without needing to run away. He doesn't deserve sympathy, or love, or acceptance, not when all of this happened because of him. Not when he knows what could have been, what he almost did. He doesn't deserve to stay here. Not in a single sense of the word. Somehow he just keeps existing, and he can't think of a single reason why he should.

(The country boys asked the Sibyl at Cumae what she wanted where she hung in her jar. Immortal, tired, broken, miserable, she answered, "I want to die.")

He almost laughs when he imagines himself dying again for the first time in a year or so. He'd nearly forgotten what it's like, wishing for death, wishing for it all to stop, wishing to disappear, but now it's coming back. That's when he realizes that he was never getting better, it was only a distraction, only a way to pretend he was angry instead of desperately sad and lonely. And now he slips almost unthinkingly back into his old ways, wandering listlessly about Amy's bungalow, wandering streets, wandering the woods, wandering his memories, sitting beside Kieren on the sofa, his mind miles away. He's far too used to this, spent too many years with crushing despair sleeping beside him in his bed or walking with him down the pavement. It's easy to not let on to Kieren what's in his head.

It's silly, how unsatisfying it is to wish for death. When you know you're too scared to do it, or when you know this time it's impossible. It's a chasm that opens up in your chest and can never be filled; it sucks at your insides, a constant tight-gripped fist on your sternum until you just want to open yourself up just to make it all go away. And after a while it's hard to remember what it's like to breathe fresh air, hear birds, what it's like to have space enough to stand. Months or years go by and there's always that pressure, the darkness, the hollow ache. It's almost laughable how cliched the hopelessness becomes, the twisted desperation for everything to just _stop_ because you're feeling too full and too empty at the same time and it fucking _hurts_.

That feeling's there for ages, and covering the dark soreness with your coat and your lies becomes the normal way of doing it, hiding behind a mask so no one else can see your thoughts becomes so easy. They can't see the things you think whenever you open your eyes in the morning, the thoughts that crowd your head and dim your every sense until you fall asleep and even then they're there. No one else knows that you just want to leave it all and go away, but that's fine. Thinking about suicide when you've been depressed for so long is practically casual. What's on the shopping list? Oh, carrots, toilet paper, milk, pens, razorblades, a gun to put in your mouth. It's normal. You're doing fine. Simon pretends he doesn't linger in front the steak knives on display when he goes to the store with Kieren and Sue.

 

Simon's twenty-five and stuck. He's itching for a fix, for a friend, for anything. He's a ghost, unstable and flickering, wandering the streets of London, lost, useless. He's been lonely before, been friendless before, but this time it's different. This time no one seems to miss him; he knows his father turns away in furious silence if his mother utters his name, knows his mother hides his photograph in a drawer, trying to forget his face. He matters to no one. He doesn't even matter to himself. He never really has. It's what got him started in all this in the first place; the desire to get out of his head, to stop clenching his fists until the nails bit into his palms and made him bleed, to block out the acute awareness that it's all meaningless, that his existence is tired and pointless and solitary. To forget that he's just waiting for the world to go black. He wonders why he even continues to look down this bleak dark tunnel, straining to see a light at the end when there doesn't seem to be one, not for him.

It seems silly to continue on when all he ever seems to feel is the pointlessness of existence scooping pits in his brain, finding any points of light and filling them up with soil. Life seems only to prod him jeeringly, laughing at his pathetic existence and inability to function without numbness in his veins and static drowning out most of his head.

He could stop it, could stop all this terrible time stretching back and back, the flinching sadness that crowds his every waking thought. He's read poems about it, every part of it, he wants none of it. Life is very long, and the shadow falls between the essence and the descent, he reads, and thinks maybe he is a shadow, maybe he is left hovering between decisions. Do I dare? and do I dare? It can't matter anymore, there's no one to care whether he lives or dies, nothing to disturb with his leaving.

He'd only be doing good for them all. He'd only be getting rid of one more useless lump taking up space in the world some better, kinder, more loved person could be occupying. To tell the truth, he's been thinking about it for years. Thinking about it for so long, it's like a small, constant reassurance in the back of his mind. He's gone through the hows and wheres and whether or not he'll leave a note and what he wants his epitaph to be.

There are different kinds of killing yourself, Simon muses. Obviously, there are different methods, but they're all their own kind of suicide. If you think maybe you might want to be saved, but don't want to be conscious if you _do_ go, you take pills. If you want one hell of a struggle with a slightly orgasmic ending, and the possibility that the rope might break, you hang yourself. Go to a train station and step out in front of a nearing train, and the decision is out of your hands. It's hard to step out of the way of a bullet in your mouth, too. Stare down at the ground from the top of a building or bridge, and someone might see you and try to help, but once you jump, the decision is out of your hands. Turn on the gas, and you have the option of turning it off again. You could drop a toaster in the bath if you like, it's painful but dramatic as hell and it's perfect if you want an easy cleanup for whoever finds you. If you hurt so much you're numb, and want to feel _anything_ again before you die, slit your wrists; you have to cut deep and it hurts like hell but in the end you can finally feel and hey, you might get saved, maybe. If your nerves are on fire and you want to be out of your head when you go, overdose on heroin, or whatever combination of drugs suits you. You'll only get saved if you've got some family member or a junkie friend nearby that actually cares enough about you to put off his or her own fix to help you. It's not likely.

He shoots up in the back alley doorway of some old abandoned factory, hoping this will be the last one even as he knows it isn't. The belt cinched around his arm leaves bigger, redder bruises than the jab and push of the needle in his arm again and again. The black and blue and reddish holes dot his arms in stinging constellations, and he knows he'll make more, knows there will be ages enough to make the whole sky.

When he wakes up dimly two years later in a building full of junkie squatters, his head in the lap of some passed out dark-haired boy, he's just aware enough to know it's the last time. Still, he pulls the syringe over to him and takes another hit, just to make sure.

No one notices he's dead for two days, and by then most of the constellations have gone dark and someone has stolen his needle.

Before he died, Simon wondered if there was a Hell. Then he died, and there was only nothing at all. Afterward, he quickly decided that this new world was hell, this metal rack was his own flaming tomb, these cold streets the sullen water under which he lies gurgling, this numb body a drying thorned bush he wants desperately to come alive again. That's the thing about hell, though. In hell, you _want_ to live, but you can't. You're forced to realize that the dreams you had of dying before are nothing, the constant ache to just tear yourself open until there's nothing left are pointless because back then, you didn't want to live, so you didn't. And now you do, only you can't.

Simon's thirty-two ( _eternally twenty-seven_ ) and stuck. He chose Kieren over the ULA, turned from the family of faith that had brought him back from the desperate brink and chose the sad boy that for some reason gave him a glimmer of hope, made him want to feel again. He chose, and this is where it got him: wandering the woods and cemeteries just outside the town, his guilt the gyre of a vulture in his head because he got Amy killed, because he could get Kieren killed, because Zoe's too volatile to be a leader without destruction, because the message of love he remembers has twisted and warped like the voice of the false god of the Undead Prophet until there's nothing left but hate.

He stands in the space between the woods and the cemetery and wonders if the silent stone images would take him the way he is, receive the supplication of his dead man's hand. Wonders if he could be allowed to make a bed here, even though his eyes are white as stars and he walks through the dead land without breath or heartbeat. Simon stands in this space between life and death and wishes someone would just make the decision for him, wishes Gary's gun might raise from across the field and take the thoughts from him, wishes Kieren would find him and pull him by the hand back to the bungalow and tell him to stay even if lips that would kiss and palms to press are numb and blue with sensationless desires. He looks from the noisy forest to the silent stones and back again. He digs a toe into the dirt and still cannot decide.

(Perhaps it's meant to be this way. Perhaps he's meant to be standing on a frozen lake, the past behind him one long cry, the future ahead something that makes him shake, and the ice is so thin that it's cracking, but too thick for him to fall in.)

Simon brought the ULA to Roarton and his party killed Henry Lonsdale, his presence fanned Gary's belly of hot coals that burned Freddie Preston and carted his charred remains to the treatment centre, his knowledge forced Jem Walker to raise a gun to her brother's head for a second time, his call in the dead of night plunged a knife into Amy's heart just when it was starting to beat again. And the whole time, he didn't even think it, didn't even realize the skin on the hands of the Prophet remained unsmudged, the gait straight and unlimping, the telltale scent of dirt and decay and pain-- hurt-- _fear_ remained absent.

Now there's weakness in him and power in Him and there's nothing left for Simon to do. Kieren has no idea the man he kisses has had his power given and taken away and torn in two. Kieren has no idea the things that have been destroyed because Simon chose to come here. Kieren has no idea that all the arts of hurting run through Simon's veins and categorize themselves as 'skills' inside his head. Kieren has no idea the man sleeping next to him each night deserves to die. Kieren has no idea that Simon is too much of a goddamn coward to try.

 

* * *

 

Three shadows are playing monkey-in-the-middle with a spark. They do not see the kindling beneath them.

 

* * *

 

They're not supposed to talk about it, not really, not even after Steve's confession or the threats of Norfolk or the Blue Oblivion. The Walker family toddles on with smiles to cover up that the map isn't labelled and they've run out of matches.

They all pretend the television doesn't broadcast new announcements about ULA attacks, doesn't speculate some other thing building, something with a different battle cry and new graffiti on the walls, and no one knows what sort of no man's land they're standing in.

The radio is on in the kitchen while Sue puts dinner on the table, the cacophonous murmur of commercials focusing on a talk show host asking for callers' opinions, the jovial voice a flame for the country moths to scream and yell at the only disembodied presence who will listen. No one is really listening; Jem is reading and Kieren is preoccupied with his own thoughts.

"Yes, hello, what's your name, caller?"

"My name's Gavin."

"We'd like to hear what you have to say, Gavin."

"I'm sick of fighting. I'm tired of watching people get killed or kicked out just because they're PDS." Kieren tunes in, frowns. What is this? Is this a convert, trying to repent? Is this a joke? "They're the same as they were before, they just came back to us again. They're still people. They deserve support. They're scared too, just like we are, and I know it looks insurmountable but maybe we can stop pushing them out and help them. Maybe if we didn't have the HVF anymore, if we didn't have Victus or the scheme thing, we could give them our hands. They're just like us, they--"

"I'm sorry, we have another caller. I'm going to have to cut you off. Hello, what's your n--"

"Whoever that bastard is, they should be afraid for their own life. Those things are monsters, they don't deserve support, they deserve a bullet to the brain. They brought about the end of the fucking world, and we had to deal with it. They ate our families for _years_! Just because they're acting like us doesn't mean they _are_ us. They could go crazy at any moment and--"

Steve shuts off the radio and trundles back out to the table with a forced look of calm. "Maybe best not to listen to the radio during dinner, eh?"

Enough hate will kill you, Kieren thinks. And what happens when disembodied voices hold fear in their fists, squeezing and squeezing until it becomes hate? What happens when the monsters are tethered, sedated, declawed and teeth pulled out?

What happens when the power transfers sides, and war becomes slaughter?

Kieren realizes abruptly that his parents still don't know what he did while he was rabid. They still smile and nod and pretend he wandered the fields with empty eyes, a shape without form or direction. They will not think of him bloody-faced and snarling. He is suddenly very glad there is no plate for him at the table.

 

* * *

 

The sun is setting through the trees and Kieren can already tell that Simon's not in, but he has a key and Simon always comes back eventually. He rounds the corner to the front of the house, only stops short and suddenly every limb is tense with frustration. Zoe does not see him.

Kieren remembers seeing footage of the Middle East on television as a child. Grainy bombs and machine guns destroying buildings, people, bodies, lives. Remembers seeing children flooding out of a school, hands in the air, weeping. Remembers thinking, _why hurt them, they're innocent? Why hurt them? Why hurt them?_

"Your lot don't give up, do you?" Kieren demands, stepping round the corner to where Zoe is spray-painting letters in crimson across the wall of the bungalow. Her cockroach pupils skitter over him and she sneers, turns back to finish her message. The hate in her eyes is the same as Gary's. Kieren aches. "It's a wonder you and the HVF haven't teamed up. Your God and theirs, it's the same. All destruction and sin, right and wrong. You can't judge people like there's only one way or the other. Haven't you ever considered that life has shades of grey? That our existence proves it?"

"The redeemed came back reborn, cleared of sin."

Kieren's brain feels like it's going to explode. He flails his arms about in disbelief. "Came back when? Out of the grave? We killed hundreds of people. Last I checked, murder was a sin."

"We were surviving, like any other creature." Zoe's lips are pulled back, exposing the yellowed teeth, the grey gums. A feral dog lives behind her eyes, crouching, growling. She has all of Simon's fervour and none of his control, none of his charisma, none of his poetry.

"So were they." He thinks of Jem's gun, of her footsteps backing away inside the supermarket.

"They're full of sin. _We_ came back pure."

"We were _dead_. There were maggots inside of us. Our bodies are broken, they don't even work anymore. There's blood on thousands of fingers out there. A shadow-man in a mask with Bible quotes isn't just going to clean that all up."

"We are the superior species. We hold the keys to death and life. The destruction of some of the living is simply a side effect. They were unclean and deserved the grave." Everything inside Zoe is gnashing, angry mechanics. She recites directly from a script in her head, like a flipped switch. Kieren wonders if Simon taught her those words. "The Prophet has told us that a Second Rising will come, and we will rise up like angels in Heaven to judge the living who have judged us."

"So you write nonsense messages on the walls of those who disagree?"

"They're not for you, they're for that Judas, Simon."

Kieren wonders if they've been marked. If a bomb will drop on them from a long way off. Who will watch it strike thinking, _they're innocent, why hurt them?_

"He wants nothing to do with you." Simon sometimes looks stricken if he finds leftover ULA propaganda in the house; he shakes his head and talks in riddles with his fists clenched if Kieren mentions them. This is a perpetual motion machine, a war Kieren cannot win, like the way he would dig his fingers into the back of his hand every hour on the hour when he first came back, desperate to be able to feel. He sighs and gestures off down the street. "If you're their leader now, you might want to get back to your followers. They're not going to stick around forever, you know."

"I hope you rot!" Zoe spits, flinging the empty can of spray-paint sermon down at his feet and stalking away.

"Already happened, thanks." Kieren gestures to his own spindly form, the swampy organs half-destroyed inside him from the month he spent in the ground. "Can't get too much deader than this."

 

* * *

 

Simon has been staring at the message for ten minutes when Kieren appears in the doorway. There is anxiety woven into the letters and Simon wonders when his world is going to stop feeling like there are earthquakes every hour.

"It's Latin," he mumbles when Kieren asks. "Just another Bible quote, s'all."

Ten minutes later, Kieren is outside with a bucket and a sponge, trying to clean away the spray-paint blame and Simon is left in his bedroom, staring at the bloodless ground, dread pressing coldly against his temples.

The conjurer sells his soul willingly, writes up the contract and signs it in his own blood. A magician cannot practice his illusion without being aware of his imminent end. Simon cannot remember giving his life away for an art, never signed his name in blood, black or red. He's only ever bled when they cut him in half and put him back together again, leaving him with a great rent in his skin that is hidden with smoke and shadows and the audience's reluctance to look anywhere else but his face for judgement.

The Prophet knows. The Roarton Redeemed are not clever enough to use Latin, would not realize he'd know what it means. This is a message from the Prophet, meant for him, the traitor, the backwards Abraham, the Judas whose pieces of silver is a boy with an unbeating but still living heart. When Simon blinks, the warning is tattooed on the inside of his eyelids.

_Stipendium peccati mors est_

_Stipendium peccati mors est_

_Stipendium peccati mors est_

For the wages of sin is death.

When he was living, Simon used to taunt death with a doped-up smile and the sharp familiar smirk of a needle or a rolled-up dollar bill or a pipe or anything he could use to put poison in his veins to prove how dead-alive he was. He thought this existence an intricate rented world from which he would soon be evicted, no chance of return. He was wrong.

They never used to talk of death, back at the commune. Their old lives were gone. They were reborn, redeemed, replenished. Rising stories have always been more important. Simon could never remember his rising, not really. Just flashes of soil, flashes of fields and his own bloody hands. The Prophet always said they came back redeemed, and Simon always believed they did. _They_ all came back redeemed, blood-guilt washed away by consciousness. _I_ am guilty, in that I have spilled the blood of an innocent. I am guilty, in that my own blood has been spilled. They pulled me from my back, my neck, said I would be fixed but only gave me more pieces, scientist cannibals in a china body shop.

As far as Simon is concerned, Kieren should stay far, far away from him. He is and will forever be that inevitable pain that will crawl from the corpse of pleasure, the sting to remind you that nothing ever lasts, that everything will drown and fall away and leave you lost and aching. Simon is a liar and a hypocrite. Simon wants nothing more than to clutch Kieren close and never let him go. Simon wants nothing more than to run from all of this, to pretend he is not doubled over with the grief of Amy's blood spilt and his own back torn from him, the guilt of her death, the fear-- the fear-- the fear of losing Kieren to his guilt, to the ULA, to the HVF, to his own good sense, to anything at all.

There is a riptide and a tsunami and both will drown and Simon does not know which one has a hold on him and he has been swimming for so long in some blind direction, following the voice of a boy with scars on his wrists and an aching, lovely heart, only now he's not sure if he's caught in the water too. And there are voices of the dead singing songs of war and songs of something else and Simon only wants to cover his ears to the noise.

For the wages of sin is death. His heart somersaults in his chest. He is screaming underwater, and Kieren is treading against the waves before him. Simon wants to push him back to shore, wants to cry out to the deaf-blind sky. Let him be! For I loved him, and love him for ever: the dead are not dead but alive.

They taught him love before anything else. They taught him new life means second chance, they taught him undead doesn't mean ruined. They taught him how a community supports each other, how it was them against the world and that's what made them so beautiful. They showed him how scripture could be a ladder and a safety harness and the warm blanket he needed most at night. They hugged him to their chests and whispered in his ear and held him by the hand, and then they clenched their fists round scripture like a hammer. The attack on the train was the ULA. The rabids in the hospital was the ULA. Freddie Preston trussed up in the back of a truck, that was the ULA. The unnamed man with a drill through his head, that was the ULA. The ULA killed Amy Dyer. The ULA gave Simon a home and then tore him to shreds, bit by bit.

He knows the mask is a mask, he knows the hands have blood in them, he knows the lungs breathe and the heart beats and that all of this is a carefully built house of cards. He is sure there is a gun pointed at his head.

In that case, why doesn't he just get it over with? He cannot feel, and yet every muscle in his body aches at the thought of existing with each lead weight of every person he's ever pushed out or let down or let die. Maybe he should give himself what he deserves, throw his arms wide open in front of that gun, put his forehead right to the muzzle so it leaves a mark. He wants to be able to watch his death as it comes to him this time. He wants to be able to thank it for finally let him sleep. He will not come clawing back for a third chance; no one gets a third chance. This time, he'll get the epitaph he wants.

Only, he thinks of Kieren in the bungalow, staring down at his will. Kieren with no one, again. Kieren, wondering how many times he has to stand in front of a hole in the ground while everyone else quietly files away. Kieren, slipping back to whatever dark place he found before, where there must be bloodstains and pain. Imagines the Walkers finding a new epitaph, a new plot. Kieren, lost again, because Simon knows that balance is precarious, and even when you think you have it, you don't. He'll stay away from the gun.

There is a sword dangling by a horse hair in the shadows. Over which head it hangs, Simon isn't sure.


	4. Here We Go Round The Prickly Pear

Kieren's bedroom floor is covered in junk. Trinkets and memorabilia litter the wood and edge onto the carpet like a raid, and Simon sits on the bed in the centre of it all, watching Kieren tear pieces of his life out of his closet and off his shelves and toss them onto the floor.

Simon had come over in the middle of the day, no one home but Kieren, to find him taking his room apart, past by broken past. Kieren had kissed him hello and gestured to the clean island of the bed before resuming. Simon plucks a piece of crumpled paper from the sea below and smooths out a very rough sketch of what looks to be a young Philip across unfinished algebra problems.

"They said they'd kept me room; I didn't realize they'd kept all of it."

"Are you sure you want to get rid of all these parts of yourself from before?" Simon peers questioningly at the pile of memories he wishes he could know. "There's a lot of stuff here could be important."

"There's also a lot of pain. It's cluttered, Simon. I don't need a lot of these things anymore, and I want to make room for new things."

Kieren goes out to the garage for a black garbage bag, and Simon is left to stare at the debris scattered around him, trying to parse out the whole of Kieren's past life from the bits and pieces on the floor. Wonders what ever happened to all the things he left in his own bedroom after the-- after. Wonders how much of the story he can cobble together on his own before it all disappears and they have to pull it hand over hand out of their throats.

The closet and one shelf get dumped in the bag, little things plucked from inside drawers and thrown away, musty, fading memories with pages falling out finally being put to rest. Kieren leans the bag up against the wall and sits cross-legged on the floor to look under the bed. He remembers when he used to be scared of monsters under there. He remembers when he stopped hiding from the monsters under the bed and started hiding from the monsters outside. Remembers when the monsters under the bed somehow climbed inside of him and then clawed under his skin to get out.

Kieren knows there is a ziplocked plastic bag with rusty insides in the back of the loft labelled " _Property of the Deceased -- Kieren Walker_ ," but he hasn't had the heart to go and look at it yet.

He pulls a game of Kick-Off from under the bed and tosses it away. He's sick of board games, sick of being stuck playing like he can roll the dice until he loses, start over and maybe get a better turn this time around. Sick of rolling the wrong number every time. Another board game goes in, stupid shit he used to play with Rick before they got the PlayStation and--

"Oh," Kieren sits back on his heels with the white shoebox across his knees, fingertips toying at the edges of the lid. He can't throw this away. He can't even move with it here in his lap. The box weighs him down, ties him to the floor and he can't quite understand why he can smell a disorientating mix of Rick's own familiar scent with the sticky, sickening stench of blood when he knows he can't smell at all, knows neither of those things are here, were ever here at all.

"Kieren? Everything okay?" Maybe there is no way to turn from the pain that lurks in the heart, the memories of wanting to hold him close and suddenly knowing this is what they call Sin, that sin can't matter when he's so full up inside. Kieren watches the bone white lid of the box slide away out of his field of vision as Simon pulls it from his grasp and places it on the bed. He follows it up until they're sitting side by side, shoulder to shoulder, the shoebox waiting silently for its interrogation.

"I'm going to open it."

Simon watches Kieren's spindly fingers lift off the lid of the box, its corners bent with overuse, nervous fumbling. He doesn't know what to expect inside, expects rusty safety pins and old razors crusted over with past stains the way he used to have a box of empty lighters and corroded, bent-up, blackened spoons behind his dresser, doesn't expect the smiling, half-painful photographs and letters and tickets folded and unfolded and refolded inside their little cardboard cage. He wonders how often Kieren thought of burying this in the backyard, how many times he shook his head and buried the memories in their paper coffin under his bed.

Simon reaches into the box like he's pressing his fingers against a bruise and putting them in his mouth to taste the congealed blood under the skin, stares down at the photograph of a young Kieren and Rick Macy sitting cheek to cheek, perhaps taken by a friend or one of the Walker family members. This boy that Kieren loved so much. This boy whose jacket Kieren wore at night. This boy that Kieren died for.

"Tell me about him?"

Kieren shifts, hand sliding into the box and resting there like it's home. Simon watches his lips twist, watches too many kinds of pain flit across his face in rapid, piercing succession. He tries not to react when Kieren's face turns to him fully, layers of grief congealing there like wax.

"He was my best friend, since we were kids. My only friend, really, except for Philip. But they hated me different from how they hated Philip, and I think he didn't want them to hate him like that after a while. So he left, and Rick stayed. But the kids at school liked Rick and Rick liked me, so they only put up their fists when he wasn't around." Kieren shrugs, fingers moving across the glossy photographs. "He broke this kid's nose once for breaking my hand. Left hand, but still. He protected me and without him I-- I'm not sure I'd have stuck around even as long as I did."

"You're stronger than you think," Simon feels a buzzing in his stomach, wants to pull Kieren close. No mirror can show Kieren what Simon sees. He tries not to crumple the photo in his hand, can't break this bubble of nostalgia while Kieren lets his own past flood out.

"Not by myself. Because of him. We grew up together, I knew everything about him and I got to watch his hands grow big and his freckles disappear. We helped each other with homework and played video games and told each other everything and knowing I'd get to see him at school was the only reason I ever went. He knew how my head was full of knives and heavy like a battering ram. He learned it was made from tar when we were little, but he stayed. He was the only reason I didn't get tied to my bed by a paralytic string. We made a blood oath once, cut our thumbs and promised we'd never ever give up on each other or leave." Kieren looks down at his left hand, the pale skin of his thumb mottled but smooth. He's tired of things disappearing, tired of holding on to things that hurt. Tired of being left with whispers and coded memories instead of something substantial. "The scar healed over way too fast. I was never sure he could keep it anyway because his father-- his father--"

"I heard about Bill Macy. From Amy." He'd heard about the voice like a hand being crushed under a boot, the guns, the way Kieren's stare had gone jackrabbit cold and charred, the knife in the back of Rick Macy's head.

"Yeah, Bill. We made a blood oath, but I guess old traditions from the wrong culture don't work like that because no matter what, his father always came first. I gave Rick a mix CD when I was fourteen and Bill broke it into pieces, threw it at my feet and banned me from the house. After that, Rick and I would meet in secret. He'd say he was at someone else's house and come to mine, or we'd meet in the middle of the street at two in the morning. We'd go down to the den at night sometimes, brought candles with us so we could at least pretend everything was warm and okay. I think we spent our whole lives pretending together, in some way or another."

He might as well say it out loud this time. Might as well get it over with, air it out. The dead will stay dead this time, so maybe no one will get hurt. Still, he stares at the deep-creased, half-broken lifelines in his palms, unable to look Simon in the face for this kind of confession. Simon's expression could be a thousand different things, could be nothing. May as well say it.

"I loved him and he knew it but he couldn't ever say it. One night, he had a massive row with Bill so we went down to the den and drank some White Lightning, smoked, I told him I loved him and he-- he turned into a brick wall. I knew what I felt and I know what he felt but I don't think he knew, or at least he couldn't say it. I'm not sure he could even think it." He never said a word when Kieren wrote their names on the wall of the cave. Glanced at the inscription, twitched his big hands around his can of beer, turned away from that bruise and changed the subject. Kieren took his fingers off the wound and pretended there wasn't a fist down his throat at that look. "And I know we could both feel me crashing into him again and again and breaking myself but we couldn't do anything about it. So he just said 'See you later' and walked away and when I called him two days later, he was at Preston. He went to Afghanistan and I didn't see him again."

"Didn't you write letters?"

"I did. He said he never got any," Kieren's head drops to his chest and Simon realizes that there was never any way to not make this tragic. "He was at Preston and I was alone but I thought maybe he'd come back, maybe he'd hate it in the army because it reminded him of his dad yelling at him all the time. But then he flew to Afghanistan and I just-- stopped. Didn't get out of bed, didn't eat, didn't go to school, didn't do anything. Couldn't talk anymore, couldn't move or even think without feeling so wrong. I just went numb, but it was the wrong kind of numb. Like it hurt so much that I just stopped feeling it after a while."

Kieren's thumbnail digs into the sleeve of his jumper, searching for the spot where the threads are already going ragged. Even physically numb now, he can still remember the way all his veins ached with grief until it was overwhelming, a fire. "And six months later my mum heard from Shirley who heard from Janet Macy that Rick was killed. It was like he was the ashes of a burnt letter instead of a person. They told me and I just-- I don't know how I lasted a month. I think I was already bled dry long before then, my body was just waiting to catch up. I thought it was my fault he was dead, that he'd run away from me because I loved him and he wasn't ready to be a dead boy the way I was, because I think I knew maybe that's how I'd end up if I didn't stop."

The weekend spent in the bathtub, Thursday through Sunday, all shriveled skin and steam to mask the tear tracks. How he'd wished to evaporate like the hot water, how the thought of disappearing had suddenly coalesced into a coherent idea, a plan.

"And then one day, I just couldn't stand to be in the house anymore. So I started walking and I just didn't stop, not for two days. I didn't know how to stop. I had a pocketknife with me and I'd thought about it before then but it just seemed like wouldn't it be so nice if everything would just go away, if I could just disappear and this horrible twisted fun house of a life would just turn off completely. I wouldn't have to wait in line for the next bloke at school to break my nose or call me faggot, and I wouldn't have to face life with Rick gone, with it being my fault, and I wouldn't have to face myself. And the knife was there and it was so nice to see my blood and feel something for once, but I didn't want to have to do that anymore. I didn't want to have to have this broken head anymore, or this body that always felt like the skin didn't fit. So I just..."

They stare down together at the history of pain sewn up in Kieren's wrists. Kieren has one hand resting inside the cardboard box and one hand pressed against Simon's shoulder like it's grounding him. Simon's own hand has dropped the photograph in his lap and wormed its way up his sleeve to the raised, blackened holes in his right arm. "I'm sorry."

"I know. Me too."

 

* * *

 

History repeats itself, repeats itself again. It holds a mirror up and then turns it around to show that everything is two-ways. You see yourself, and then you're seeing yourself in somebody else.

Kieren is crying out, clawing himself awake from nightmares in the dark, the knowledge that Rick is gone thudding loudly in his chest, and then it's six years later and he can hear Jem crying out down the hall, her own fears thudding against his door.

He's in the hallway, sneaking along the blue light of three-thirty A.M. and half-wondering what sort of ghosts live in this hall. There, the blood from his skinned knee when he was seven and first realized that people didn't like him here, though no one could tell him why. At the window, Jem watching him and Rick meet in the street in the middle of the night, and pressing her fingers solemnly to her lips when he sneaked back upstairs wearing a coat that wasn't his and a twisted expression he could never explain.

Against the bathroom door, the way he'd taken his mother's razor to his chest, his legs, the tops of his shoulders, because at least then the blood could tell him he was something solid. In the corner, Jem hiding from their parents' holiday party with both thumbs in her mouth, standing on her toes. Her eyes are huge and wet but she does not say why; she turns away and pretends he cannot see her. Mr. Kendal's laugh is harsh and booming below.

There, on the landing, his deadened silence where there should have been screams. The way he felt like he was oozing across the floor. The way his world felt like it had ended, how the ground was falling away beneath him. The way his insides had disappeared. The guilt that coated him, just under his skin. The thread that sewed his mouth shut until he cut every cord completely.

Painted across the walls, the explosion from the muzzle of Bill Macy's gun that made Jem swallow a scream inside her throat. Kieren was already all screamed out by then, in his head.

Through the crack in the door, Kieren can see his sister fighting the sheets like a monster, like a fever. He knows there is a special way of being afraid, that the Walker family is maybe more than halfway to broken, that existing is starting to mean making things up as you go along even though it's almost impossible. Jem whimpers and her body twists like something is wringing the pain from her, so he presses into the room and closes the door and steps closer because he can't just stand here and watch.

Kieren's heart mimics his sister as she buckles and contorts round the fears in her head, too heavily bound by sleep to claw her way out of it. There are too many nightmares in this town. He's watched more night terrors tighten their coils around people he loves than he cares to.

"Jem. Jem, wake up. Jem." He presses against her calf gently, but even that sends her flying awake, gasping, clawing under her pillow for a gun that isn't there.

"No, oh god, no!" He wonders if she's still half-asleep, caught inside the dream. Nightmares come with claws and ropes to hold you down and strike you when you're weak.

"Jem, it's just me. It's all right."

A shuddering swallow, her breathing hitches as terror's noose finally loosens and she turns towards him in relief, only it's not all right, not at all, and Kieren remembers too late that he doesn't wear makeup or contacts anymore. A sharp, hoarse-throated cry and Jem is curled against her bed-board, hands fisted over her eyes.

"Oh god, Jem, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I didn't mean-- I'll just--" Kieren starts for the door. His mistake is a thunder in his ears, bruising, _what if I hurt her, what if I made her worse, what if everything she's been working toward is ruined, she's my sister what if I--_

"No. Please, Kieren. Stay here."

He turns and looks at her through lowered eyes. Her face is tear-stained, strands of hair stuck to her neck by sweat. She looks ragged at the edges, something that's caught on a barbwire fence and torn through. A stained towel is laid out in the center of the bed and she looks at it the way she'd looked at Henry's bracelet, the way she's started to look at guns.

"Jem, can I...?" She breathes in sharply, gaze stopping at his mouth and flinching away, over, minnowing through the room but she nods and he comes forward to sit on the edge of her bed. She is a baby bird; her fear trembles all the way down to the tips of her toes but she doesn't move away.

"I'm sorry."

"What are you apologizing for? You had a nightmare."

"That ULA attack in Leeds two weeks ago? I dreamed about it, only I was the one killing all those civilians, with my gun instead of the drug. I didn't mean to be scared of you." Her eyes find his face. He can see her forcing herself, _don't look away. Don't look away. This is your brother and he will not hurt you. You walked away from him eating your best friend's brains because he's your_ brother _, and it's your fault she's dead, so many are dead, but he's not going to hurt you. Don't look away. Maybe it's like exposure therapy, if you stare long enough, you'll stop imagining all the people you shot alive and blaming you because_ you _could have saved them. Don't. Look. Away._

"It's all right. Jem, what--"

"I'm sorry I joined the HVF." It rushes out of her and she deflates. Hitches in a breath and collapses back against herself. Her fingers twist and convulse against the sheets and it looks like she's strangling a pair of ghosts. "I'm sorry I almost killed you twice."

Somewhere in the past he remembers guileless eyes. Remembers light brown hair and feet that had just come down from the air. Remembers, "Mum told me to say sorry I dropped your ice cream cone on the ground. I didn't mean for it." Remembers his own grey shrug, barely fifteen years old and a broken CD still in his head all sharp pieces and distorted sound. Ice cream didn't matter so much anymore.

"You were just trying to survive. Everyone was. Like a war, only one whole side has amnesia. You didn't know we were going to get better. You were just trying to stay alive."

"I _wasn't_ though. I went and visited you every day after school, did you know that? I was so _mad_ that you'd left me, that you'd done that to mum and dad. And then everyone started coming up and it just wasn't fair you had to come back like _that_."

Kieren used to imagine what it might be like to be a bullet, or a fist. What it might be like to leave a mark, to go so fast that you could turn yourself into a ghost, explode on impact. He used to get dizzy if he closed his eyes. He'd open them and it would still be dark, he'd still be hurtling towards nowhere, fingers locked together like he could pray his way out. He never said anything. Sometimes the silence felt like the highest pitch of screaming, the kind so desperate but no human ear can hear.

He feels like he's watching Jem hurtle along some dark track too, only this time her hands are clenched like she's holding a gun. This time, tears are sliding down her face and her mouth is sewn shut but her throat is working and there _is_ sound this time.

"I thought I was getting back at you for-- and then I thought I was doing good, like I was protecting mum and dad, and Gary was helping me. But it was just my way of pushing back against the laws of nature, just like you did. And he was just me punishing myself for thinking I could do that and come out redeemed. Like I don't have just as much blood on my hands as the rest of you."

Kieren's fingers worm under the cuffs of his sleeve, as if he can run his fingertips over his ragged scars, take his empty pulse and come back with some sort of definitive answer. "You asked me, before, what I think we are. And I still don't know, but I know we didn't come back redeemed. I know we have blood on our hands and all of our bodies are broken and when we first came back, hunger overrode everything. Then fear replaced that and I think a lot of people decided anger was better than fear. I don't think I agree with that. But fear isn't-- it isn't..."

"No," Jem nods, understanding. "It's not. And I think... I think I'm going in reverse. It's like when you died, when everyone started coming up, I hated everything. I was so angry I didn't have time to be afraid. Now I can't stop shaking. Every time I go outside, I think everyone is blaming me for killing them, for not killing them, for taking sides."

She twists the front of her shirt in her hands, round and round the way she used to do when she was little, just after she stopped sucking on her thumbs. "I wake up sweating because I-- I dream about all of it, every second of it. And sometimes things I've heard get all twisted up in the things I've done, and I'm so scared of myself in my head. I wake up and I can't breathe and I feel disgusting because--"

"Jem?" Kieren watches her shrink, watches as she sags down until her hair is drooping in her lap, shoulders hunched like a cave. But she rights herself despite the sheen on her upper lip, the flush of her face, the way her shoulders twitch.

"I dream about it all and then I wake up and I get so scared in my dream that I-- I've wet myself." She punches the mattress. "Fucking Christ! Most nights, too. It's bullshit, really it is."

"It's all right, Jem. I don't think you can help it. But... I thought therapy was supposed to help?"

"It's _supposed_ to! Instead, I'm back to being a child wetting her bed." She snatches the soiled towel and crumples it into a ball, hurling it at the door where it lands in a heap. "I can't go outside because all I can think of is death, and I always feel like I need my gun with me but I know if I had it, I might kill someone else. I wake up dirty and I don't think I can ever get clean, and I walk outside and I feel _naked_ and soft like some small animal. The entire world has teeth or bullets and I don't and I feel like I'm paralyzed."

They stare at the purple pile of cloth on the ground and Jem shudders at the view of the slow-spreading dark. There is dirt under all of their fingernails and fear in all their veins but that doesn't mean she isn't the one to blame. They could tell her it's not her fault, she could tell it to herself, but the reaction is proof painful, the blotch is accusation. It doesn't matter that it sits limply at the bottom of her bedroom door. Kieren knows this, too.

Everything can be summed up in one crumpled, fear-stained towel.

 

* * *

 

The spark falls, as sparks do, and the middle shadow is brightened by the fire ignited beneath it. On either side, the darkness is blind, and it only takes the breath of the shadow itself to fan the flames higher. There is truth in the things that fire alights, in the things that flames will burn away.

 

* * *

 

Some things only ever give you tics, little ways you hide yourself from yourself until everything is covered up, until you have to tear away the wrapping, rip open the suffocating cocoon to uncover what's inside. Simon always tries to press his back into wherever he's sitting, to pretend he's not open all the way to the inside, to pretend it's harder than it is to wrap arms around his organs and claim them. He does not feel it, but pain on mute is still pain, and he cannot dress without squeezing his eyes shut tight and imagining a bone saw cutting through pure, pale skin. He can never tell whose it is.

This is the way Simon has always been: when the world cuts you open and threatens to fling salt into the wound, lose yourself inside other people's words until it feels like you're a fictional character and nothing else is real.

The kitchen door slams shut as Kieren comes inside, adding sound and movement to the sticky amber stillness of the purgatory that the bungalow becomes when it's only Simon staying there.

Kieren leans over the arm of the sofa to kiss him before flopping down on the other side of him. "What're you reading?"

Simon holds up the book he's been reading on-and-off for a week. "Lord Of The Flies."

"Mm. I remember that. Had to read it in literature class once. Hard to think even little kids can be so awful."

"People turning on each other out of fear and abuse of power. It's human nature, I think."

Kieren kicks himself up off the couch to retrieve the box of charcoals Jem gave him for Christmas and a sketchpad. He settles on the chair across from Simon, sketchpad propped by one knee. Simon returns to his book. He can't stand that he pulled this one off the shelf when he returned from the graveyard the other week, but now he can't stop reading. Every scene yanks at the back of his throat, feels too close, too real. Like he's returning to the same damn spot again and again, it's familiar and compelling in a way he doesn't want to place. Kieren is humming tunelessly in the back of his throat, frowning down at the paper in concentration, the sound a sort of wordless, sotto voce hymn. The hum becomes white noise in Simon's brain, lulling him into a trance that finds him reading the same paragraph over and over without registering the words.

Simon thinks of the knife, the static skeleton, the quiet whisper of memories getting louder, a commanding, echoing voice in the painful dark. He thinks of two complementary rings of human beings, churning together in opposite directions with the same stamping, gnashing hatred. _Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Beware Rotters! The Dead shall rise again incorruptible! Rise! Rise! Rise!_

And again he's on his knees in the graveyard, only this time there's only a horseshoe of the Redeemed with bone saws and bores storming about him, the living dancing around the outside, guns stretched towards him. The chant echoes against the tombstones. _Rise! Rise!_ Simon covers his face with his arms. Kieren is not beneath him. He is sacrificing for no one. The noise around him is shrill like a pain. He cowers, half-sobbing. "I don't want to do this anymore. You hear me? I don't want to do this anymore! Please!"

They're not listening. They don't understand. He lurches as one Redeemed punches out at him with a blade, lands on his arse and scrambles backwards. The shrill laugh of hyenas fills the air. The Undead Prophet up on his hill somewhere is laughing at him, nodding on his strings. Simon can't get the words out to explain. The hill is nothing but smoke and brambles, the undead flesh has blood and sweat and a pulse. The digitized voice is only a beast with its claws gripped tight to the tendons of fear.

The dance goes on around him, angry, incensed, crazed. _Kill the beast! Rise!_

He thinks they will slash him open and offer him his own intestines to hang himself with, a Judas for them all. He has no silver with which to pay, only bones and gold. Sixty-five pounds and an American dealer who was bad at conversion. That's how much his life cost.

The living break into the circle; a bullet strikes his shoulder. He screams and staggers to his feet, can only stagger as he tries to get away, lurching between headstones streaked with moss. The circle follows him. _Kill the beast! Rise! Rise!_ His foot catches in the bars of the metal cage over Vicar Oddie's grave and he falls, landing on something soft. There is not earth beneath him, but a slim body with marred wrists and hair like gold that fans out in a halo. There is black bile around his mouth, and a bullet wound in his head, and he is still.

The body on the hill can breathe, the circle feels nothing but hatred and hunger, his silver coins are nothing but kisses that have betrayed him. Simon has only bones.

 

* * *

 

The truth is, it's hard to stop a belief once it starts. It spreads like an illness, too fast to catch. The idea of peace means nothing if someone still thinks they've been slighted.

Kieren learned this the hard way, and once people found his existence unpleasant enough to scream at him in the school hallways and shove him to the ground, there was nothing he could do but stand under the avalanche and hope he could straighten himself out afterward. There was never a way to change any of it.

Simon comes out of the bedroom when Kieren slams the door. "Did you turn on the television when you woke up?"

Kieren frowns, already moving to turn on the rickety set in the living room. "No, why?"

Simon watches him, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. His teeth worry at his bottom lip. He looks frightened that Kieren might bolt. "There's been another attack. Blue Oblivion. ULA members took some in a shopping centre."

"Was anyone hurt? Killed?"

"Five dead. Sixteen wounded, but mostly they were hurt when people were trying to get out of the place. Three of the ULA members were shot."

Kieren turns from the muted television. When you fall in love with a double agent, any news could mean the walls are turning red. "Was it people you knew?"

"I don't know," Simon replies, shaking his head. "I don't think so."

"The HVF technically disbanded months ago, and attending the Scheme isn't mandatory anymore. There's been more talk than action, no attacks until recently. What does the ULA want?"

"To be noticed. To be in control. They wanted people to stop treating us like shit, but it's gone too far. They've filed down their teeth, they've grown thicker bone. They're trying to reignite the war."

The Undead Liberation Army, using their drugs like brass knuckles, like rogue antisocial teenagers punching out pedestrians and stealing their wallets. Initiating members with blood under their nails and murder in their eyes. Spray-painting propaganda on subway walls: ULA Rise. And some invisible hand responding, blue slashed over the red, a new opponent: Face Us.

"Something's going to happen." Kieren eyes the stampede being repeated on the screen. The gnashing teeth of the rabid ULA, the fear-stretched faces of civilians trying to shove themselves out of the doors. The red spray paint on the glass suddenly smothered with blue in the next shot. "Stuff like this going on, it feels like something's coming."

"And we can't do anything to stop it, not out here."

"I know."

 

* * *

 

Confessions never felt right to Simon. Telling your muddy, blood-stained secrets to a man behind the screen, where he gave you the memorized, therapy lite version of advice. If he was going to tell someone a secret, it would just be whispered to God through his cupped hands while he shivered in the street.

But he's unsurprised when he spills his guts out to Kieren, smiling ruefully the same way he did that day out by the fence. It was almost unsurprising then, too.

It's strange to be quiet together, the sort of silence devoid of breathing or heartbeats in your ears, so you have to shuffle a little every so often to shake yourself awake. Because quiet makes your mind wander, makes you drift into thoughts you're not sure you want to explore, and they're lying on top of the sheets together while Simon reads and Kieren-- stares at the ceiling with a book discarded beside him.

"You trying to burn a hole in the roof?"

Kieren turns his head towards Simon's voice, blinks slowly. "Hm?"

"Never mind."

The morning light stripes its way across the wall above the bed and Kieren tilts his head up to look at it upside down, closing one eye and then the other.

"Do you ever think..."

Simon raises a brow in amusement. "Well, yes, generally. Gets a little hard not to."

Kieren kicks out at his shin despite their lack of sensation, then falls serious again."Shut up, I wasn't finished. I just mean, do you ever think we could have avoided all this? I mean, you and I specifically."

"What, like dying later instead of when we did?"

"Yeah, I guess."

Simon puts his book face-down on the bedside table and rolls to face Kieren. "I'm not sure. I wanted out of here for so long, I think it was just a matter of time. Sometimes I'm surprised I lasted as long as I did. Sometimes I feel like I was waiting for it."

"You already knew? I mean, you said before, but for how long? And how?" Simon is already rolling up his sleeves, up past the crease of his elbow to expose the trail of infection-grey puncture wounds and half-risen scars that have staked their claim in his skin. He doesn't jump like he thought he would when Kieren touches them.

"When I was five, I learned what poison was. At first, I thought it sounded like the most perfect potion in the world, and then I realized it might be inside me. Like maybe because I knew there was no point, I wasn't meant to be slowly dying like everyone else and just waiting it out. Me dad read Seamus Heaney to me once and I thought maybe everyone assumed they were supposed to be a half-preserved corpse. Only I was on the table with my senses still on high. It just got worse from there, and I couldn't go outside or talk or move without wanting to scream, because everything was too much. My whole being was just a wound with too much salt in it and I didn't know why. I thought maybe it would stop if I left home, so I went away to uni but it only got worse, even though I was doing every drug I could get my hands on to claw my way out of my head."

Kieren's fingers trace the track marks like melancholy constellations. Simon wonders if he can somehow map a timeline through the holes in his skin, from wrist to elbow and back again. Something that doesn't circle back to a black hole against his lungs. "So I decided maybe I'd run a little farther, and I went to the United States. The States took me in and sold me numbness so easily and I took it without a second thought, I needed so badly to be out of the noise in my head, for everything to stop making me flinch. I got high because it made today fade away and made tomorrow all right, I didn't have to think about anything anymore. Everything got smaller, more manageable. It was all muffled and I didn't have to live with my hands over my ears."

"And then you came back here." Kieren leans his head on his hand so their eyes are level.

"After a year, yeah. I came back here and tried to live at home but it all came rushing back. So I ended up in some crooked flat in London with a bunch of other junkies and all I cared about was the way the world finally cradled me gently when I had heroin in my veins. I...wasn't a very good person. I did a lot of awful things so I could get high, and I always knew I was going to die, every second of every day. I just didn't care anymore. I just wanted to not think about it, even though I was always thinking about it. Like a hamster wheel that won't stop, a morbid fucking perpetual motion machine."

There was the belt round his arm, the dark-haired boy, there was lying on his back in an empty room with dripping walls in nothing but his undershirt. There was the syringe, and the grating _scritch_ of a lighter that won't light, there was consumption, surrender. "I don't really remember the last year of my life. It's all just hazy. Either I was on drugs or I was aching from all the blackness and the pins and needles in my head. And then right before, I remember waking up and _knowing_. I don't know how I knew, or why I sobered up for just that second, but I knew I was going to die and I fucking _wanted it_. So I gave myself another hit just to make sure. Because I suddenly knew I never wanted to wake up again. And then I woke up in-- in the treatment centre."

There is silence, but Kieren presses close to Simon until their knees knock against each other. They pretend-breathe together, and Simon wonders if being this exposed has ever felt this safe to anyone else. Kieren's fingers twist together between them like he's resisting the urge to pick.

"You know, sometimes I wonder why we had to come back if we were the ones that wanted it." Kieren shrugs one shoulder, like one tiny movement can encapsulate all the bewilderment of waking up when you wanted to die. "Amy I get, but us?"

"I don't know." The sunlight has moved, striping Kieren blue and yellow through the half-closed blinds. Simon misses bruises, misses pushing down on damaged skin for the dull ache, the way bruises were like his feelings worming down into his skin inside him, some immortal maggot rebelling against flesh and bone to remain bitter and grey where he pressed his fingers. "Did you ever want to leave after you came back?"

"Yeah, more than once. Thinking like that felt like default. Still does sometimes. Maybe we're wired wrong. Like everyone else has survival instincts and we've got the opposite."

A dream that might have been reality, Kieren collecting generations of knives over hundreds of years: butterfly, bowie, paring. Kieren, cutting grooves into his heart with a straight razor. A dim wall where sharp metal smiles glisten in the candlelight. Kieren in necromancer's robes, plunging a sword into his own chest.

The pale, delicate artist's hand slides across the sheets until the fingers find Simon's. Simon knows he can't feel it, but he squeezes Kieren's fingers, hard. It feels like they're doing all of this backwards, saving each others' lives and tracing scars before they ever talked about the story of it all. Existing like this, it's like trying to solve the puzzle of puzzles, snapping pieces together and never knowing if they're supposed to fit because there's no picture to look at, no guide.

"Life scares me, you know. More than it's supposed to, I think. It used to hurt so much I'd shake."

"Do you ever--" Kieren remembers the question that used to haunt him, fogging his brain, a standing chill, until he confused whether he was a mind without flesh or flesh without mind. "Are you ever unsure you exist?"

The look on Simon's face is like Kieren has finally put to words something he never could. It almost reminds him of that night when they cleaned each other's faces so gently, that first real moment. Then the expression is gone, and Simon is staring down at the way his thumb rubs dully against the rest of his fingers.

"Sometimes, yes. It was worse when I was alive. It was like I could feel my body but I couldn't at the same time. It was terrifying and I thought maybe I was watching a projection of the world in a tiny cave somewhere. Sometimes now I remember that we're numb and I wonder if I'm just watching me somewhere else."

"I thought maybe I was always supposed to be a ghost." It gets a little skewed; Kieren still forgets to be solid sometimes. For so long before he even entered the cave, he was already so perfectly dead.

"Maybe we just exist in reverse. Maybe we're not sure how. I haven't known who I really am in a very long time." Simon pins his gaze to the mattress, hunches his shoulders and ducks his head like he's ashamed, like he just hadn't run fast enough to catch what had already disappeared. "I don't know whether I'm running from myself or if there's just nothing there. Other people hand me a mask and I take it, swap it out for one of the others that I have. I don't know which ones are Simon Monroe and which ones are the scripts I've based myself on since long before I died. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I don't know who or what I am."

Simon is alone in a room full of funhouse mirrors; it's been so long he's not sure which reflection is supposed to look right to him. There is a long list of forgeries of his own sprawling signature. He can't tell which is his own.

He was buried in a suit his parents bought for the occasion, then home and dressed in his old Sunday clothes he hadn't worn since before he left home because Dad had burnt all his grimy black and leather things, the stench of sick and pain and _run away, run away_ too much to handle. His lungs ache like someone's been breathing for him. Does he even remember the last time he heard himself breathing?

Kieren pushes his fingers hard against the flesh of Simon's shoulder and wishes he could see a mark. "There's something there, I know there is. Underneath it all. I mean, what is a person anyway? What am I? What are you? What's anybody now, when the world is like this?"

"I start to shake when I think about it. I'm just a bunch of pieces that aren't put together quite right. Sometimes I think I'm only made for breaking myself or other people."

"You saved me, at the cemetery."

Simon presses the tips of his fingers against each of Kieren's knobby knuckles, feeling the way the scaffolding moves under the skin. Their noses bump together as Kieren moves closer. "I think you're different. I've only ever hurt all the people around me while I tried to destroy the poison in my bones."

"You're not a bad person for all the times you tried to kill your sadness, all the ways you tried to bury it. You can't be. You didn't know the only way finally to run from it was to destroy yourself completely. Even when you're living and thinking about death every moment, it's still an unimaginable concept until you're right up against it."

"I _wasn't_ for so long and now...what do I do now?" Simon finds that he's desperate for direction, wonders how Kieren suddenly became the one answering questions, the one with gentle hands and a sad but certain voice. He is bits of a shipwreck, pieces clinging to him by just a thread. There is no cure for drowning, is there?

"Find Simon Monroe. Figure out which faces are yours and which are not. It's okay to be pieces. Just know which ones are you. They printed a script onto your tongue, but you're allowed to erase it and find your own words. You don't need a faceless god or any sort of idol to tell you who to be. It's in every atom of your blood, in the way you speak-- _you_ , not the bits you've got memorized. You just have to untangle all the knots and let go of the ones people have tied on to control you."

The blinds stripe them light and dark with sunlight, like cuts, like prison uniforms, like the cracks around a door. Simon is still used to bracing himself for heartbreak in the night. This time, Kieren is facing him, chin up, eyes up. His hands are loose and open in front of him, and there are no bones sitting in his palms. Simon's fingers are dirty, still black around the nails, but Kieren takes them anyway, gazes at him with gentle eyes. Simon wonders if there might be another use for rope besides a noose.

 

* * *

 

In the night, Kieren dreams he is waiting at the train station. It is summer, and the wooden boards of the platform creak under his feet with the warmth of the sun. He is in short sleeves, his scars are there but it doesn't matter this time, and he turns his face up to the light to feel the way it bathes his face with glow. He has no luggage waiting beside him, no ticket in his pocket.

The train should be coming soon, and Kieren looks up to see Rick walking toward him, suitcase in hand. There are thin black lines across his face where staples had once tried to fit him back together, but he is smiling, mouth open in a silent laugh the way it only ever is for Kieren. There is a ticket in his left hand, and the back of it shines with the broken pieces of a CD. That's where that got to.

"Well, I'm off," Rick shrugs at him when they're standing toe to toe.

This is familiar. Broken hearts waving goodbye to broken hearts. "Preston?"

"No, somewhere else this time. Not sure yet. New places, new people. I'll know it when I get there."

A whistle in the distance, and the thunder of change. Kieren turns to look towards the oncoming train, but Rick cups his cheek with a hand and turns him back to press a gentle kiss to his lips. The touch is warm, soft. Kieren thinks of candlelight.

"I'm gonna miss you," he whispers honestly against Rick's mouth. But he feels curiously light, even as the train's wheels screech to a stop beside them. There is no ache this time. Rick smiles a lopsided farewell grin, eyes crinkling.

"I'll miss you too, Ren."

They do not say goodbye. Kieren watches the doors open, watches Rick climb on the train and wave to him, eyes clear, watches the doors close again. It is still warm, and the sun is still shining, and he is still okay. The train pulls out of the station and Kieren turns to find Simon standing a small distance away on the platform, threadbare rucksack on one shoulder, watching him. He is wearing a clean suit and his eyes and his smile are gentle. They meet each other in the middle.

"Hello, Kieren."

The kiss hello is deeper than the kiss goodbye. Simon's hands are strong on Kieren's face; the stroke of a thumb across his cheek is a shiver of affection. Simon's body presses forward, presses into Kieren's body until they break apart, half-breathless.

"Are you staying in Roarton or just passing through?" Kieren asks, but he can already feel the corners of his mouth curling up.

"I'm staying put," The words sound like a promise, in the way Simon's heart is beating so loud he can hear it, in the gentle way he threads their fingers together, like their lives were always meant to be looped round each other. "I'm staying here with you."

Simon's palm is cool and slightly rough, the hands of a man who has clawed himself across continents and back but still loves just as large as an ocean will allow. They turn towards home; the landscape that stretches before them is green and shining.

Kieren wakes in his own bed without fear for the first time in years. There is a smear of black across his pillow from a fresh nosebleed, but he is smiling and for a moment, he thinks he might be feeling warm.

 

* * *

 

There is a phone box with skittish reception and an eerie glow and it has seen too much. It has heard midnight calls from Rick to Kieren when there were bruises across ribs that wanted to be proud despite the marks they bore. It has listened to Mrs. Lonsdale's tearful call to the police as her little son collapsed in the marketplace aisle, heart so frail it could not even last seven years. It has seen Rick's frantic warning, his earnest but inexpressible apologies, his sorrow. It has overheard the quiet, reverent whisper over the line from one disciple to the next, Simon's throat still gilded with awe.

It listens now, too, when Simon returns, his feet weighed by so much lead, his throat coated with the fear he could not describe to Kieren before he left. It watches his fingers flatten out a folded paper with a number written on it, the way another did years ago, watches shaking fingers close over the receiver, watches Simon's white eyes flick around him, out and over the town, rapid, jaw clenched, trembling.

A distant ringing in his ears, in his ear. A paper with a number expressly forbidden by the prophet. Simon bows his head with the phone pressed to the side of his face, wonders idly if the cord can reach to the ground so he can crouch there in penance, bend his forehead to the floor and beg forgiveness from he knows not who. He doesn't know which knuckles to kiss, whose feet to fall before. But he cannot believe anymore. He cannot be handed a self and find truth in someone else's garbled, ill-fitted mask. No matter how silent his heart is, he still needs to start making his own choices. He still-- He still-- She is still dead, and she is still dead, and they are all still broken and there is silver and--

And he feels guilty, like he's betraying someone, like he's trapped in no man's land and neither side will take him. There is a headache word in the ringing of the telephone, forming behind his eyes. _In what I have done and what I have failed to do..._ Unmask yourself, the blue words whisper over the red. Show your true self, show your true loyalty. There is no way to do this but to walk blindfolded up to the scales and place his heart down upon them. Vultures can and will rip him apart, but he will do what he must.

It still feels like betrayal.

"Yeah, hello?"

"Listen, this is Simon. I know you know who I am. I don't believe any longer, there's no reason to worry that I will betray you. Don't talk, I have some information for you."

 


	5. Stretching Before And After

Simon is lying in the middle of a war zone, in the middle of a highway, in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of the couch in the living room. He twitches constantly, hands turning into birds, or sits statuesque for hours, fingers cupped against his mouth. He stares blindly, wanders from room to room, recoils when he touches things as if dogs are snapping at his hands.

Kieren watches all this. It feels like there might as well be blood leaking from the corners of Simon's mouth.

There is a crack in the spine of the Bible on the bookshelf; it wasn't there before.

He tries. The time he tries in the kitchen, Simon interrupts with their neurotryptaline doses. The time he tries just inside front door, Simon thuds the door closed and kisses him like he's trying to bury himself. The time he tries in the bedroom, Simon feigns sleep but Kieren can see that he is awake, can see his white eyes staring out into the darkness of the hallway and why does it feel like there's something oozing inevitably towards them?

"What's going on?" Kieren asks, when Simon has begun another slow, unfocused circumvention of the house, moving like he's walking on the bottom of the sea. As if he's wading through fog, as if he's somehow become a ragged nothing, a ghost within a ghost. Simon looks at him through his lashes. "You keep doing this, like you're looking for something that's not there anymore. What is it?"

"I'm not doing anything."

"You're not talking. You're not even _here_ anymore. You haven't left the house. You close your eyes, you open them, nothing's changed. What are you looking for?"

"It's not important." He watches Kieren with skittish eyes. His back is always to the wall, hands feeling behind him for something to press against.

"Then _talk_ to me. Simon."

"I can't. Not yet. I have to... I'm stuck. I have to think."

"You're not making any sense." But Simon flinches away, shakes off his hand like an animal ripping its leg out of a trap. "I want to help."

Door wrenched open. Late afternoon air they can't feel, sun half-ready to set and it shouldn't be golden like this, not now, not today. Kieren stands on the front step watching Simon trudge away down the street and wonders if he'll see candles when he turns around.

An hour, two hours, four, the sky is bruised blue-black and Simon has not returned. Kieren has closed his eyes, opened them, closed them, opened them again, nothing changed, he's still not back, and this time he's not going to sit and wait for Simon to return. Shoes, coat, torch, sense of desperation.

It's the woods, of course it's the fucking woods, he's run away into the skeleton trees that get blacker the closer Kieren gets. The ground is muddy; he follows the shuddering beam of light from his torch as it slaps against the dark masses of trees in the evening dull. Wind rattles like bones and Kieren feels his ribs twisting and bending like the wind has its hands on them, too. The trees and the space between the trees are black, bleeding black, the light slipping through the spaces where it cuts its way through.

Places of death have a siren's call: you go to a grave, it does not come to you. The chthonic song tells you this has happened and will happen again, this will happen to you and to everyone you love. You will live trying not to think about it and then you will die, and people will go to the spot because there is a stain there and darkness is drawn to darkness.

Kieren stares at the gaping dark mouth of the cave, a black hole that looks larger and more dangerous with every fresh encounter. Just looking at it feels like a foot missing the rung of a ladder. _Cause of death: blood loss from self-inflicted vertical lacerations to forearms. Thirty-seven stitches in each arm. Cause of death: the ghosts that haunt ghosts in the night, who read love letters until it hurts too much to love a spectre anymore._ He cannot set foot inside that place. There is a dull ache across his chest, because actions fix meaning to a landscape and when the only meaning you can find is pain on mute with the volume up, and actions repeat themselves over and over, there is no way to hide from the past-- or now, or any of it.

His light captures a shadow, a silhouette, white eyes. "Simon? Will you come out here?"

The silhouette turns toward his voice. The silhouette says nothing. White. A spectre. Another ghost. Another dead thing in a cave. Kieren shakes his head to clear it.

"Please, Simon. I can't-- I can't go in there. Please come out of the dark. I know... I know it gets you if you stop to think too long. I know it takes you by the hand and leads you to the cave and then you-- Please come out. I'm here, I want to help you. You know I get it. Please, Simon."

Here is the scrape of shoes against stone, here is the white hand that curls around the jagged edge of the cave's mouth, here is the avalanche that has been threatening the cave of Kieren's chest righting itself. Simon stands in front of him, head bowed, shoulders hunched.

"Is that where you...?"

"Yes," the answer is quick, breathless.

"I'm sorry." Fingers curl against the crook of the opposite elbow, a phantom gesture of craving relief. Simon shakes his head like a fly has wandered across his mind, speaks like he doesn't want to taste his own words. "I have something to tell you."

"Well, can we do it back at home? This place-- I don't want to be here very long."

Simon waits until Kieren has started walking to follow, the shadow behind him from the torch stretches a shroud out long and limp on the wet leaves. Kieren slows, falls back until they're side by side, presses slowly closer like he's approaching a wild animal, like he's pretending not to look. Their hands brush, and Simon jumps, flinching away with a mumbled apology that lodges fear in Kierens chest like he's just swallowed cold glass.

 

* * *

 

At eleven o'clock begins the burning of the bodies; Simon knows it, knows he may not survive this intact. Everything in the open, light it all on fire. The tale of the rising of thousands reduced to the murder of one.

Back inside the bungalow, Simon goes to the sofa without waiting for instruction, stares at his feet as Kieren turns on the light, puts his coat away, perches on the sofa beside him. For a moment, he wonders if he should sit behind a screen, like a confession, but no: Kieren needs to see his guilt for everything that it is, no pretending like he deserves to be magically absolved of it all by an invisible priest and a thousand Hail Mary's. God, when he'd been alive, now is the time he'd take a hit to get himself through this. Simon clenches his hands on his knees like broken claws and stares at his feet and stares at his feet. Opens his mouth to speak and chokes in a useless breath, swallows, tries again.

"I didn't come to Roarton just because Amy brought me with her. I was sent here on a mission. By the Undead Prophet." There are bullets sitting heavy in his stomach, scalpels dropped inside of him are poised to tear out his organs. "I was to find the First Risen."

Kieren nods slowly, attentive. "And you found them?"

"And I found him. I thought he was going to be worshipped, that we were going to bring him in and he would liberate the Redeemed from the clutches of the living, that he would call up the second rising. We thought the second rising would bring about freedom for all of us, and the First would lead it. But messiah and martyr are not the same thing. And I didn't know."

"Didn't know what?"

"I trusted the ULA, because they took me in when I had nowhere else to go. I was so lost in the city, lost in myself. I was trapped and they rescued me. They were my family when I had no one. They sheltered me and taught me and for the first time in my life, I believed in something. For the first time in my life, I had a purpose that wasn't going to destroy me. I was broken but they looked at me like it didn't matter, like I was whole."

Because the walls of that hollowed-out building felt more like home than the haunted room he'd been kicked out of. Because Simon was hugged more in that moment when the ULA took him in than he had ever been touched in his life. Because for once, touch hadn't made him want to claw his own skin off. Because somehow the hand of God reached him, even in the festering, subterranean depths of the torture chamber that smelled like antiseptic and stood disguised as a hospital. And it had pulled him out.

"So I became the twelfth disciple of the Undead Prophet and I came to Roarton to find the First Risen. And I found him, I heard him say that he had come up at midnight, no one else around. And I told the Prophet. You remember I said I'd gone to the city?"

"Yeah."

"I went there to meet with another disciple. To receive orders. About the First." The static is loud in his ears, the distorted hotel television, the way he forgot how to breathe, couldn't breathe, wasn't supposed to breathe. Isn't breathing now. He presses his fingers together like prayers. _I confess to Almighty God, and to you..._ "I was told I had to sacrifice the First Risen at noon on the twelfth of December, and that he would bring about the second rising."

"At noon?" Kieren frowns, eyes darting to the side as he searches his memories and Simon thinks _please don't realize it_ and _please don't make me say it out loud_ in the same breath. "But that's when-- Is that what Maxine Martin meant when she said 'the first and the last?' Philip said something--"

"Yes. Yes, that's what she meant. I still don't know how she found out."

"But it wasn't Amy, was it? You weren't there."

How many ways has Simon tried to kill himself? How many chemicals have burned through his veins, his lungs? What razors touched his skin? What rough schoolboys ground him into the dirt screaming 'faggot' in his hear while he closed his eyes and felt gravel scrape at his lungs? None of it felt like this. _I'm sorry, I'll take it back. I'll stop time, I'll do something different, spin the wheel and land on another choice._ But time doesn't stop, and Kieren is staring at him with frightened eyes, and he is still going to burn.

"No, Kieren."

"You were at the cemetery. You saved me. But I remember hearing metal-- And your followers were there, too." Kieren scrambles off the couch like he's been electrocuted. Presses his palms to his temples, his eyes. Paces rapidly around the room. "You thought it was me? You thought I was the First Risen?"

Simon flinches. "You said so, that day at lunch. There was no one else around, you said. There was the storm. The clock was striking midnight."

Kieren stares at him incredulously, balls his hands into fists, and for a moment Simon thinks he's going to punch him in the face but he only strikes down at his own thighs. "Simon, I _made that up_! I wanted to scare the pants off Jem and Gary! I wanted my parents to listen to me! Oh, Christ."

It isn't fair. It isn't fair, Simon frozen on the sofa and Kieren with his nails digging into his own scalp, making small aborted muttering sounds as he crosses the rug again and again. It isn't fair, flinging everything he had up into the air again and hoping he can catch some ragged bits on their way down so he's not left cold and barren on the side of another road, under another graffitied sign, with another scar on his back.

"I couldn't do it, Kieren. I couldn't do it." He may as well dig his fingers into the wound, let himself bleed out. If he's going to break, he may as well do it all the way. Everything in the open, all of him in little pieces at Kieren's feet. "I got there and saw Gary pulling you out of the truck and I followed. I had the knife in my hand, I had my instructions. But I'm not-- I saw you and I couldn't. You were the First but I loved you and I couldn't imagine... That gun, I--"

Kieren continues to gape at him, rasps out his words with his face twisted in horror and confusion. "Oh my god. You--"

Simon feels everything inside him collapsing, the ladder of his spine crumpling in on itself. He closes his eyes, he opens them, nothing has changed. Kieren is still striding back and forth in front of him, fingers clenched in his hair. Simon imagines he is under Kieren's feet. _I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will._ Simon stares down at his knees. Silence. Followed by more silence, only broken by the sound of Kieren's boots grinding the floorboards and Simon's bones to dust. His insides are ice. He may as well be dead again.

"Tell me you hate me. Tell me you hate me, tell me to leave forever, yell at me. I can handle that."

Kieren shakes his head, stops pacing just to shove his hands against his temples and continue shaking his head. "I can't. I can't. Simon, you tried to--You were going to-- I can't. I have to-- I have to be alone."

He turns on his heel, half bent-over, and rushes out of the room. Simon listens for the sound of a door slamming, things breaking, the slam and rustle of possessions being packed away. Instead there is only the muffled creak of Kieren sitting down on Simon's bed.

Left alone in the living room to shrivel inside his own guilty thoughts, Simon suddenly can't begin understand why he ever believed the Prophet, why he was ever that desperate for a faith built on violence and rubble. What emperor of hunger holds his court of gnawing, lonely bones and pretends to give them light, only to char them like ants under a magnifying glass before they realize he's just a body on a hill, just a man behind a curtain? They took him in and told him he was special, that they weren't monsters, that they were something very good, an army built up in the name of God, in the name of the Prophet. They yanked identity out of every hand and threw it to the fire, built up blank, directionless rage. Home isn't supposed to have peeling walls and propaganda on the tables, anger and loss in every other heart, he should've known that. He should have known that it was never about him. It's like he never left the arms of the heroin; a different sort of idol was there for him to love, in the prophet, in the religion he thought he'd rejected years ago. The treatment center backed him into a corner; the ULA finished the job. How did he ever believe that the grinning skull was anything other than empty? But he did believe, and he did love them, and he was a disciple, and he had a knife. He doesn't anymore, but he did. That is guilt enough, something he cannot buy penance for with ivory or pearl or gilded words.

 

The bungalow is silent. An hour ticks by and the world seems to shrink to the shadows of the room. Simon remains stiff on the sofa, trying not to strain for any sound from the bedroom. It feels like his ribs are collapsing. If Kieren never wants to speak to him ever again, he'll understand. He will. He's been frozen with liquid nitrogen, he's creaking and aching, waiting for the final breaking blow. He closes his eyes, clenches his fists in the fabric beneath him, clenches them in his lap and pretends his knuckles are rosary beads. _Hail Mary, full of grace. Pray for the hour of us sinners, now and at the hour of our death and after, and after, and after. Hail Mary, full of grace. I believe in the Holy Spirit. I believe in the Undead Prophet._ I _believed_ in the Undead Prophet. I believed in the ULA. I believed they might save my soul. I believed they gave me back the heart I'd thrown away; I believed there was a holy reason. Why did you betray your own heart? Would _you_ like to live life with your soul in the grave? Yes, holy God, _yes_ , if only to spend it with Kieren Walker. Something inside his chest seems to shift and ache. He stands, feels weak.

The dim lamp in the bedroom is still on, bathing the crimson room in gold, and Kieren is awake, staring ponderously at his own hands. He looks up when he hears the floorboards creak; the disciple stands in front of him, sagged against the doorjamb, eyes roaming the floor as if lost. He sits up just a little straighter, beckons mutely for him to be received. Simon climbs onto the bed where Kieren sits cross-legged, lies himself sideways in Kieren's lap, curving his body around Kieren's thin torso. His head is tucked up against Kieren's right side and his bent knees hugging his left; he has no place left for dignity or comfort. Kieren only bends his head closer, until his hair is brushing Simon's ribs, and whispers blessings into the meaningless rise and fall of Simon's empty lungs. A benediction. A forgiveness he has never deserved. Still, Kieren's fingers card through his hair and run down his arms, clasping the hand that held the knife and kissing the blameful knuckles.

Simon would weep if he could.

Kieren's hands fall back onto the blanket as Simon stands on shaking legs. He is weak and hollow and his fingers feel like winter-worn twigs as he unbuttons his shirt and lets the shroud fall away.

Everything needs to come out. All of it, because it doesn't matter that the sheets are clean if the body is still dirty, and he still has things hiding in the dark, and there is a zipper that runs the length of his spine, the teeth broken and black.

He is bare and terrified.

There is a sharp gasp behind him, a low moan of horror, and Simon cannot contain the hurt within him. The sun is shining through the clouds outside his window, turning the sky a brilliant silver; it only makes him think of the scalpels that tore him open and turned him into a whipping boy, a tarnished example, a broken animal flinching from the hand it should bite.

Simon thinks, There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.

"Did they do this to you? At the treatment centre?"

"Yes." He is Halperin and Weston's crowning achievement gagged and bound in the back of the closet, he is needles broken off in swollen veins, he is the burning ribs of a sinking ship. He is a bloated carcass with its back picked clean by birds.

He is Isaac, slain.

"Simon?" Kieren asks, voice hesitant and small like he's speaking to a spooked animal, like he's afraid to know the answer. "Why?"

The story comes out slowly, stilted, haltingly when Simon chokes on the memories being pulled like barbed wire from his throat. How he just wanted to be fixed, wanted his family to look at him like he wasn't broken, for once. How John promised and Simon thought he could be the good son, thought he could sacrifice his body for the salvation of others. How electricity tore through his muscles and even though his whole body was numb with this new half-death, the terror sparked phantom pain in every nerve.

Simon sits down on the bed, cannot look towards the mirror, cannot look towards Kieren. His back is a nightmare exposed, made real by the twisted minds of humans. Other creatures do not torture for information. Other creatures do not destroy to discover. When he cried out, they patched up their handiwork just enough to pretend he was human, just enough that they could still look at him and think "subject," so they could see the mark of their genius and think, "I did that for good." A dissection subject doesn’t have thought, doesn’t have feelings; they're not supposed talk to you on the operating table. A dissection subject doesn’t express fear, doesn’t beg for mercy. He was bound facing away from them; they could pretend not to see his face twisted and terrified, the way his empty body tried to weep and howl with pain it could not produce.

So he tells in a whisper, like anything louder might make it even more true, how he begged, pleaded for them to stop. How they had had turned away with their fingers pressed into his spine, false saviours grave-robbing to peddle ground bones labelled as a miracle. How he'd gone back to Julian shaking and broken, how he had curled in the corner to keep his back from the wall, how he had said nothing at all. How his father's eyes had stared at him like Simon was a body he'd found bloated and floating in a bathtub, grey and vacant. How Simon had spent the ride home inspecting the dried husks of his own fingernails, the blackened bits of blood and dirt that would never come out, and which of those flecks was part of his mother?

How Simon wanted nothing more than to kill himself again ( _total emptiness forever-- not to be here, not to be anywhere_ ) after his father threw him out into the night to sit forsaken and lonely under a message that only served to scream in his face that he couldn't be human anymore, not with skin like wax and veins like dried riverbeds and a canyon of painless pain down his back.

And the ULA offered shelter, offered faith and support and a new, universal identity in a neat little package of "you don't have to be a monster," offered the one thing he hadn't had in too many years: unconditional love.

Because back then, and even now, he was a pile of hollow, uneven bones and he never knows what to do with himself.

Simon pulls his shirt back on without looking at Kieren, leaves it unbuttoned as he stares down at his hands, the way they curve and bend like he's been gripping a rope for too long, like he's been holding hymn books without ever looking at the words too closely, like he's forgotten how to live without clutching on to something.

"They taught me how to walk and pointed me down a path and I took it without even asking a question. They told us were were more than just a monster, more than just a person, that we were the good kind of creature. Different from humans, a better being. That our old selves were destroyed to make way for this new, exceptional thing that we were. I _believed_ them, blindly, because they were all I had." Simon's fingers have gone from rosary beads to pages of a bible with gum stuck between the pages, stale and stringy and frustrating. "They gave me quotes and gestures as a safety net and I pulled people along with me and it got Amy killed. I could have changed direction."

"You didn't kill her." Kieren sounds so sure that it hurts. There's an avalanche in Simon's head and he can't stop it picking up speed, gathering bits and pieces of truth and lies he knows he believes as it rushes through him.

"I did, Kieren. Whoever told Maxine Martin, however she found out, I was the only one with that information. I came from the city with the instruction to kill the First Risen. No one else knew but me."

"That doesn't make it your fault. You didn't touch her."

"It's not just her. I'm a fuck up, I'm a junkie. I'm an asshole who ruined all my friends' lives when I was alive and then I died and they could finally be happy without me around to weigh them down. And then I fucked it up again because it was lucky to die and I knew it, but I came back when I shouldn't have." He can see the dirt under his fingernails, the mark of Cain. Whatever good beast the ULA has framed him as, the picture's been torn away. There's still time; he's still prepared to step in front of the Prophet's gun. He almost feels like he desperately needs it to be too much. "I killed my own mother. I _murdered_ her. I ripped her apart. And I got Amy killed. I nearly killed you. I'm the one who should have a knife in my head. I have the river Eridanus smoldering at my back and I'm afraid I might drown you. I don't deserve to exist, not like this, not the way I am. Not with what I am. A monster. A sick freak. Never was anything else."

"You're not a monster. You're just a person."

"But--" Everything he's ever known, everything he's ever been told, wiped clean in a sentence.

"That's all you need to be, a person. We're just humans, we can't control every aspect of our lives. You would have stopped it if you could; I know you would've. It's not your fault you came back or did what you did when you were rabid. We had no control over ourselves and you know that. It's not your fault that they took advantage of you at the centre, in the ULA. _They're_ the ones that betrayed you, _they're_ the ones that hurt you. You need to strip away all their scripture and preaching and find the person that's been lost in it all. The human, underneath all the words. I know it's hard, but you have to start to let the guilt go."

"Kieren, I--"

There is something very large in Simon's chest, ballooning up into his head. He stands with a ringing in his ears, goes to the dresser, distantly hears Kieren's bewildered "what--?" behind him. A final secret, revealed. His fingers close around the black plastic handle of the serrated bone knife, the blade dirty and half-rusted, and for a moment he is back in the dream, black blood staining his arms.

Kieren stares at him, alarmed, when he turns with the blade in his hands, but Simon only holds it out, balanced on both palms like an offering. It hovers between them, a confused boundary, the lion ripping out its claws and offering them to the lamb. When Kieren only frowns down at the saw's serrated edges, Simon places it on the bed in front of Kieren's folded legs.

"Take it. It's yours now. Do whatever you want with it." The words scrape his throat on the way out. Simon lifts his arms away from his body only a little bit, presenting his chest like it's the right thing to do. Like a traitor only too ready for the poisoned wine. Like his only wish is to made obsolete. Like it's the only thing he'll ever deserve. Kieren stares down at the knife in front of him.

Then he picks it up by the handle, stepping around Simon's stiff form invisibly half-crucified by his own guilt, Simon standing ready for a blade in the back of his head and only silently offering his skull, Simon waiting patiently for his throat to be ripped out, and places the knife down gingerly on the top of the dresser.

"Simon?" Kieren moves slowly to stand in front of Simon, peers at him, concerned, empty palms upturned. Something inside Simon snaps, dissolves, and he lets out a rush of air as every aching secret falls away. Kieren's fingers find Simon's arm, slide up to his shoulder, and Simon's expression suddenly crumples, his head dropping down onto Kieren's shoulder, pushing his forehead against the curve of his neck.

Kieren presses a hand against his nape, presses his lips to the curve of his ear. "We need to stop being in love with death. We need to stop dying all the time."

"I'm not sure if I can," Simon's voice is muffled by Kieren's shirt, by the way he clutches at Kieren's back with stiff fingers. "It's all I know."

"I understand, believe me, I do." Kieren strokes Simon's hair gently, slides his other hand across his back to pull him closer, rocking them like they can make a tide together and wash all the pain away. "We've got to try, though. This life is so very long, and we need to stop living in shadows. I lost myself once, I don't want to do it again. And you're allowed to make it up as you go along, Simon. Nobody knows what they're doing in this world. You don't have wear somebody else's mask."

He eases them both onto the bed with Simon still clutching at him, lets him fall half into his lap and half on the mattress, strokes his back until Simon finally pulls away and sits up, face dry but his eyes are devastated like he'd have been crying if he could. He breathes in, out, in. Looks up at Kieren with an expression like standing at the edge of a cliff and you've only taken one step back.

"I've got one more thing to tell you. Something important about the ULA."

 

* * *

 

The shadow becomes a light, becomes a spark, becomes two sparks dancing together in the smoke, becomes a bonfire. In the dead land, two armies scratch and scatter. In the dead land, one man wears a rat's coat; in the dead land, another plays at a man hanging from crossed staves. Sermons say you cannot lie your way into heaven if you are empty. Sermons say "Thine is" and "I Am" cannot exist together.

Sermons say the sin of a false idol and a fall from Jacob's Ladder are blacker than the sin of tearing yourself open to get to the bullets God has put in your veins. Blacker than pressing your skull against the cold ground without Charon's coins under your tongue. Sermons say there is nothing between death but life. There is a Shadow coming into light, and this is the way it goes.

Two armies ask: who wins when every body is wounded?

In a hollow place, two men who have been consuming are consumed. Something new is gathering, marching to a lighter song.

 

* * *

 

It starts with the front door slamming and Jem pounding hard up the stairs like she's running from something larger than herself. Her bedroom door slams hard enough to shake the walls and Kieren hears the thud of her boot hitting the floor, and then the other, and then there's another thud, and a fourth and a fifth, and a small crash like she's just dropped a drawer on the ground and Kieren is up and pounding on her door.

"Jem?"

"Fuck off!" Her voice sounds like it's clotted with tears, and she throws something that thumps heavily against the other side of the door. Kieren thinks of the sound of fists against a dashboard.

"Jem? Are you okay?"

" _Go away_!" This comes out as a scream, raw-throated and wracked with pain, like her throat is already shredded and there are monsters at her heels and more things crash to the ground. There is the sound of plastic shattering.

Kieren sinks to the floor and leans his back against the door, settling his arms on his knees, listens to the destruction behind the door. He can hear things ripping, breaking, drawers being wrenched open and shelves being knocked clean. Jem punctuates it all with angry, grunting half-screams, sobbing like she's digging a bullet out of someplace tender. Kieren closes his eyes tight and listens to her pain. It goes on for a long time.

He feels her shoulders hit the other side of the door, the vibration as she slides to the ground. Her sobs are quieter now; they still shake through the wood. Kieren moves away from the door, presses a hand against it.

"Jem, will you let me in? I want to help you."

The sharp thud of a fist pounding on the door once, twice, angry, indecisive. Jem sniffs wetly. The door opens a crack and Kieren stands and edges his way inside.

Jem's bedroom is trashed, and she is sitting on the edge of it, knees pressed to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, a look on her face like a bombed-out church. Her video games have been dumped on the floor and stomped on, bits of plastic scattered like shrapnel across the rug. Some of her posters have been ripped off the walls and crumpled into twisted balls; the ceramic skull that sat on her desk has been smashed. Broken knick-knacks and ripped up bits of paper litter the ground, splintered, twisted ruins of a past life disillusioned. Her HVF jacket sits on top of it all, the neck torn.

"What's happened, Jem?" Kieren folds himself beside her, half-sat on bits of plastic, but he can't feel them.

"I'm a fucking coward," she says to her knees.

"You're not."

"I am, though. I thought I was doing all right, you know? With the therapy and all. I thought I'd gotten out of the cage and fear was loosening from my throat and it was just bad when I was asleep and only hovering when I was awake but I was fucking wrong." She tugs at her hair like it can move her brain around until everything is still again. "Someone smelled like her. That's it, that's all. Someone smelled like her and suddenly I was _there_ again and I was terrified and I couldn't do anything, couldn't get out of there, couldn't run and she was on the floor with her head ripped open and blood everywhere and I--"

Kieren pulls her hands away from her head, holds them tightly. Wishes he could erase her apocalyptic grief. "It's not your fault."

They've all kept their teeth in a pistol to move faster than fear. When there's no bullets left, what's left but to scratch out the eyes of the hungry nightmare? And now Jem thinks she's been declawed.

"I'm fucking _weak_ , Kieren!" Her face is still shiny wet and contorted. Her expression is screwed up and devastated but she's still looking him in the face, and she doesn't even realize. "It was nothing, and I wanted to die! It was just a goddamn smell and I nearly wet myself in the middle of the market. I couldn't breathe, Kier. I couldn't do anything, I was so scared all I wanted to do was run away and hide. Fear was dragging me around on a leash. I'm just a coward. I thought I was getting better, I really did. How can something so small do that to me?"

"You _are_ getting better. I know it's hard to believe, but you are. You came back here. You didn't hurt anyone or yourself. You're talking to me."

"I did that." She jerks her head towards the shattered shrapnel across her floor.

"Why? What is all that?"

"I got angry. I got scared. It reminded me..." She looks away from him, away from the pieces, all the broken reminders. "They needed to go."

"You're getting better." Kieren stands up, offers a hand and pulls her up to him. Pulls her into a hug before she can duck away, but she clutches at his back and buries her face in his shoulder and something inside his chest twists at the realization that it hasn't even been two days since he held Simon like this. "Come on, why don't you clean yourself up. I'll go get some bin bags."

They open the blinds to let in the light, throw Jem's bedclothes in the wash. Jem surveys her room, tosses a few more things on the ground, still breaking them but with less vehemence than before. Kieren watches her pushing it all over the cliff, watches all the failures and hurts tumble over her shoulders and fall into some barely-marked grave where they belong. They can break it all, throw away all the weapons, all the sharp edges so she can start anew. Together they pick up the pieces to throw away, plucking shards off the floor, and with every piece of hurt disappearing into the black bags Jem looks lighter, until she's standing in front of three full bags tied shut, staring down at her old life finally leaving her.

Jem has been stuck in a loop, stuck fleeing a monster again and again, trapped drowning in some well inside of herself too deep to drink from without falling in. She's tired of drowning. She's tired of running. She tells Kieren this through tears, trash bags digging into her side, his arms clutched around her too, but when Kieren asks, she shakes her head and tells him this is the best she's felt in months, maybe years. Her eyes are wet but brighter, and she's smiling. The bags go in the bin outside, and Jem's room feels less like a burning cave for the first time since she was thirteen.

This time, she is clawing her way out of the shadows, finding action, finding essence, finding reality, finding handhold and foothold to drag herself across the little known and lightless road back into the world again. Kieren thinks maybe she is proof that the Walker name is a well you can drink from or drown in, but soon someone will come along who doesn't want to die anymore.

And there are still teeth clutched in Jem's hands, her eyes still find the closest exit, corners are still dark when she steps into a room. But it's simple to understand: this isn't over, it has only begun. Still, when Kieren looks at Jem's face, something new is blooming there.

 

* * *

 

There are riots in the night, and they're woken in the morning by a phone call from Jem, which Simon answers through the dream still stuffed in his mouth. "Turn on the news," Jem tells them, and hangs up.

Kieren drags himself out of bed and stumbles into the living room to turn on the television. Simon trails behind but part of him knows what's coming, is unsurprised by the bold _Breaking News_ title card at the bottom of the screen. An over-lit news anchor is speaking to the camera, a pinch between her brows.

"PDS sufferers and living alike have taken to the streets, rebelling against the exposure of the so-called 'Undead Prophet,' leader of the PDS vigilante group the Undead Liberation Army, as living rather than PDS. He was exposed by a group of anti-ULA undead, who were tipped off by an anonymous source. There is evidence that he may once have been an employee of the Norfolk PDS Treatment Centre."

Simon's hand finds Kieren's when he finally sits down on the sofa and squeezes hard, like there's something impossible gripped between their palms. Like maybe Babel has become Jerusalem will become Asphodel.

A window appears next to the reporter's head depicting a rain-wet street somewhere, a car on fire and angry PDS sufferers leaning out of broken windows in the buildings above, screaming and beating the air. A burning ULA flag flutters to the ground, ragged with ash.

"It is uncertain where the man calling himself the 'Prophet' has fled to, but sources say that both living and undead have threatened him since his status has been revealed. Buildings occupied by both ULA and HVF members have been vandalized or destroyed in the rebellion, seemingly by their own residents as well as their rivals. Patients at the treatment centre in Norfolk are reported to be rioting as well, and guards are struggling to keep them in order."

The camera cuts to footage of a city, London maybe, Manchester, Birmingham, who knows, somewhere where every person wears a mask even when their faces are uncovered, and here on the screen there are PDS sufferers and living working together, spray painting a united, angry betrayal onto the walls, smashing windows, cutting open the belly of the nation to expose the soft greedy paunch within. And maybe he who was living is now dead, maybe he is alive but fleeing across the country, anywhere, anywhere, away. Maybe he has curled away in a bunker with his frightened family.

It doesn't matter. They are watching the world morph onscreen, watching the armies twist and un-become, watching the shadows shrink. Watching the form of limitation push against the line, push against the scripture, push against the grave.

Simon finds the remote blindly, flicks through other channels. A pro-Victus representative shakes his finger at the camera, red-faced, cutting the air with insults, accusing any undead of being terrorists, of being dangerous. A woman with a tired face relates the headlines, but she looks relieved. Here is a clip of another city street, more riots, more angry faces,eyes white or coloured, more fists in the air, things on fire, but no guns. There is ammunition enough in bodies, in chants, in refusal, in rage.

The television stays on all day, a hum in the background, Simon's eyes continuously flicking between the screen and Kieren. This new movement is emblazoned with blue to combat the ULA's red. People march with signs, graffiti tags appear, cries are raised: PDS Are People. No More Pale Wars. Let All Live. Unmask Yourself. Face Us. Frankie comes by to tell Simon that Zoe is dead, all-dead, a stolen gun pressed to her temple on her bedroom floor. Brian has disappeared. The others have gone home, betrayal singeing their skins.

What happens when the blaze dies away and the scorched earth finally cools? What happens when the shadows disappear? Pines remain, blackened but unburnt. New life pushes through the ash.

"Simon, come here, look." Kieren calls him away from the kitchen and the neurotryptaline guns and back to the television. There is a man on the screen with sandy hair; he sits upright in his chair and looks calmly into the camera. Familiar words ignite the screen below his face.

"This new rebellion has been termed 'The Second Rising' by participants. It seems that PDS and living have come together across the nation to protest Victus's Give Back Scheme and the recent rash of Blue Oblivion-induced attacks from ULA members. Friends and family members of PDS sufferers have become more and more frustrated and restless regarding the measures against PDS sufferers' work and travel abilities and there has been a call for a dismantling of the Victus party, the Give Back Scheme, and the travel ban. The people on the streets seem to be advocating peace between living and undead. There is no approximate count for the number of people protesting today, but it is no small figure. "

And suddenly, it feels like whatever this fever-burnt nightmare was, something has crested, broken, people are tired of hiding and tired of fear. There will be wounds, there will be fists fights and broken glass, but someone has sucked poison from an old wound, and now it's easier to patch the new. Shadows are shrinking, and blocks are falling back into place, the twilight of the world slipping into morning.

Simon feels something inside him unlock, and Kieren is laughing, smiling, and they are clinging to each other's arms like they can each pull the other up. Kieren's eyes are bright white and Simon kisses him, presses their lips together and something thrums and shakes inside of him, climbing his ribcage, this throat and pushing at the back of his teeth. He pulls Kieren closer, buries his fingers in ember-gold hair, laughs, smiles, pulls air into lungs that should be breathless but aren't, and realizes with the quiet burst of epiphany that he finally does not want to die.

This is the way the world ends, and begins, and ends again; not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a spark.

 


End file.
